I am Sam.

Sam I am.

He doesn’t like Green Eggs and Ham.

Until (spoiler alert #1) he finally tries them.

Then all good.

A message of hope to parents everywhere and words of wisdom for young picky eaters to hear in rhyme and internalize.

Multiple times a day.

Every day.

For months.

Are you more of a visual person?

Then this sums it up:

First?

Next? 30+ pages to convince Sam otherwise. An obsessive quest that pretty much makes Sting look like he wasn’t really trying with the 1983 Police Hit Every Breath You Take.

Then?

The letter I in my A to Z is brought to you by Sam-I-Am and the I Can Read Beginner Books.

If you are an English-speaking parent of kids born any time after 1960, you’ve probably come across this series.

My eldest was more a Cat in the Hat kinda Seuss fan.

But my 4-year-old? Green Eggs and Ham 4eva.

I’ve spilt some ink on this blog (can you do that on a blog?) both on literacy in general and about how we are sending our kids to French school. The latter point has made most recent posts on children’s books be about French books. But I’m English and part of the joy of being a parent is introducing your kids to the many things you loved about childhood.

And Dr. Seuss is pretty much required early reading in the English world.

As for Green Eggs and Ham (first published in 1960), as of 2001, according to Publishers Weekly, it was the fourth best-selling English-language children’s book OF ALL TIME.

On top of that, in case you missed the little icon in the upper right-hand corner, it is also part of pretty much THE English early reader series.

I speak from a place of some knowledge on this point. A couple of years ago I blogged about how I’d been gifted a misbound copy of the book that launched Dr. Seuss.

As I tried to figure out if I’d been gifted a gold-mine (spoiler alert #2: No) I learnt about book clubs and specifically, this book club.

The little icon on Green Eggs and Ham and so many others is for the I Can Read it All By Myself Beginner Books distributed by Grolier.

Beginner Books was co-founded by Phyllis Cerf with Ted Geisel (AKA Dr. Seuss) and his wife Helen Geisel. Cerf compiled a list of 379 words as the basic vocabulary for young readers, along with twenty slightly harder “emergency words”. No more than 200 words were taken from the list to write The Cat in the Hat, which is the first book in the series. Subsequent books in the series were modeled on the same requirement. The Beginner Books “dominated the children’s picture book market of the 1960’s“, and continue to shape the early literacy landscape.

We own and love quite a few of them. They can sit for months in our house and then are found again like old friends.

Joyful and fun to read, they help many kids – including my daughters – discover the wonder and adventure to be found in books.

(I Can) Read on.