Literacy Learning Stages: The Cat In The Hat

Literacy learning that occurs in the early years before age eight, helps prepare the child for school and life success and produces long term developments. The amount of language a child hears in their first years of life contributes to their cognitive development and human interactions that include language form the foundation for their ability of reading comprehension later in life. “Vocabulary development at age three has been found to predict reading achievement by third grade” (Lesaux, 2013). Later in the literacy learning process, when the child begins to read, they begin to learn new words beyond the familiar words they hear their family use in their daily life. They begin by being read to out loud from their parents. When this happens, they hear language about new topics, new concepts, and new vocabulary which, when combined with pictures, become the building blocks for their literacy development.

One of the first types of books that comes to mind are the Dr. Seuss books. Dr. Seuss is a famous and ever-popular author who used a number of techniques for young readers. The Cat in the Hat is a great example of how he uses short and simple rhyming words along with alliteration, which grabs the reader’s attention and begins to build the child’s vocabulary. Along with that, it includes pictures and tells a story, which entertains all ages, the young and the old. Books with few words, bright and engaging pictures, and repetitive text are great for young readers learning word recognition. One type of this book is a book of sight words. This could be as simple as a book of the ABC’s, where the letter is accompanied with a picture of an object that starts with that letter, or a book of farm animals which feature pages with mostly white space, one animal per page and captions with simple text, such as, “A sheep,” or, “A