The many hats of Theodor Seuss Geisel: prewriting activities

An author gets his ideas out of his head and on to paper to share with others. Not all the ideas an author comes up with make it, but it's important to get ideas out to make room for new ones!

Always one for a bit of fun, Ted Geisel jokingly responded to the question of where he got his ideas with this:

"I get all my ideas in Switzerland near the Forka Pass. There is a little town called 'Gletch' and two thousand feet up above Gletch there is a smaller hamlet called 'Uber Gletch." I go there on the fourth of August every summer to get my cuckoo clock repaired. While the cuckoo is in the hospital I wander around and talk to the people in the streets. They are very strange people and I get my ideas from them."

Prewriting

Getting stduents to share their ideas can often be a struggle. Students may feel they have nothing to say. Try these Seuss-inspired pre-writing activities to get the juices flowing.

PreK-K

Pretend and play. Pretending to be someone else stimulates imagination and exercises language skills. The man Ted Geisel did this often -- whether he was writing as Dr. Seuss or creating art as an imaginary Mexican modern artist!

Talk to your students about Ted Geisel and his use of the pseudonym Dr. Seuss to help them understand that Geisel and Seuss are one in the same. Share facts about his life to help make him a real person to students. Then discuss some of the very unreal and unusual characters he created. Using his biography, help students find links between Geisel's life and his characters (i.e., Geisel's father ran a zoo and Geisel created a lot of interesting animals in If I Ran the Zoo). Finally, ask students to pretend to be authors. Get them thinking about their own backgrounds and experiences and what they might draw from to create their own characters.

Grades 1-3

Look, imagine, think. A little extra encouragement to pay attention to their surroundings can help provide rich fodder for young imaginations. Observing a stranger wearing a morning hat during a train journey from Springfield, Mass. to New York led Geisel to imagine that this man who sat in front of him "was so stuffy that he'd probably grow another" hat if Geisel reached forward and removed it. This is exactly the problem poor Bartholomew ended up with in The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.

A man wearing a hat is a very ordinary observation. But when you run it through Seuss's imagination, the ordinariness is gone! Discuss with students how Geisel used his imagination to make the leap from "man in hat" to "many hats growing out of a boy's head." Then have students test their own powers of observation and imagination. Ask students to record their observations on the school bus, in the cafeteria, or on the playground. As they observe, ask that they look and think twice -- with their eyes and with their imagination.

Grades 4-6

Pre-write to sound or music. The words will often flow as the music does. It wasn't music, but the rhythm of an ocean liner that gave Geisel the cadence that echoes throughout And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street. During a stormy North Atlantic crossing, Geisel kept his mind off choppy water by finding words that fit the chug of the engines. To get the rhythm out of his head, Geisel spend six months writing and rewriting his original notes from the voyage that became his first children's book.

Select music or recordings of unusual sounds to play for students as they write. Tell the story of Geisel's voyage, but let them know you won't be blasting them with sound for eight straight days! The idea behind this pre-writing exercise is for students to generate ideas, characters, themes, or rhythms that can be further developed.

Grades 7-9

Encourage doodling. Some of the best ideas may be lurking on the back of notebooks or in the margins. Geisel was a great doodler and saved his many doodles. The book Horton Hatches the Egg was born from a doodle -- a gust from an open window near his desk blew a picture of an elephant drawn on tracing paper on top of a tree that Geisel was doodling. This started him thinking about why an elephant would be in a tree, and he had to write Horton's story to find out the answer.

Share this anecdote with students and ask them to save their doodles for a week. At the end of the week, pair up students and their doodles and have them come up with their own combinations to write about. Students can produce a joint work or each write their own ideas about the doodle combo. As some doodles will be more inspired than others, don't limit them as to what they should write -- it can be a simple description, a poem, or a story.

Grades 10-12

Look at lists. When presented with a limited vocabulary list and the challenge to create a book for beginning readers, Geisel described the year-long effort to create the verse for The Cat in the Hat as "being lost with a witch in a tunnel of love." It's only because "cat" and "hat" were the first rhyming words he found on the list that children everywhere came to know and love a wily feline.

Talk with students about the challenges of writing books that young children will be able to read, and want to read for fun. Share the vocabulary list from The Cat in the Hat and discuss Geisel's struggles with it. Next, ask students to create their own vocabulary list that reflects the 21st century environment (early exposure to television, books, and video games, etc.) while remembering to keep the vocabulary readable for first graders. Take a look, too, at the limited vocabulary in Green Eggs and Ham -- limited by a bet from Geisel's Random House publisher, Bennett Cerf, that Seuss could not write a book using only 50 words. Discuss what pre-writing and organizing approaches would help make meeting such a challenge possible.