Author, poet and educator Babs Bell Hajdusiewicz will do whatever it takes to get a child to read.
She'll repeat a favorite story or line over and over and over again.She'll jump up and down, make funny faces and talk about giggle-getting subjects like underwear. If a child's not paying attention, she'll change the text and put his name in the poem.
Despite the antics, says the lively author, it's generally the words that catch the child's interest.
After writing more than 80 books and 300 poems and spending several decades as a teacher and educator, Hajdusiewicz is a pro at taking knowledge, bringing it down to young people and making it fun.
"I have found that there is nothing you can't sell to a child, including Shakespeare, if you make it fun," she says, stressing the importance of building oral language in children. "The more they speak, the more ready they are to read."
Placing a child in front of a book without preparation, says Hajdusiewicz, is like trying to pronounce her name without first hearing it.
With a twinkle in her eye, she explains how her name is pronounced phonetically - HI-doo-SHE-vitz. Like her name, her books and poetry capture the imagination of children with rhyming, repetition and fun. At 52, she describes herself as a Type-A personality who works 24 hours a day and is always looking for good story ideas.
The measure of any good piece of poetry or literature, she says, is how fast it grabs the reader, and that is especially true with children.
"Many children, even in higher socioeconomic levels, are not in language-rich environments," she says. "They need to be able to play with the language, and many haven't done that or been read to or heard nursery rhymes. I tell teachers: Look at the leaders in your class - they are children who have good control of language. If children can express themselves, that leads to good self-esteem."
Hajdusiewicz never planned to be a writer; it was an art she came to through teaching. Her goals growing up were to be a teacher and a mother. As a teacher and director of special education in Indiana and Michigan, she often used poetry with children, especially mentally impaired children.
As an administrator and later as a college professor, she began noticing an increasing number of children in preschools who were "language-deprived." When her own children entered preschool, she noticed the situation was not getting any better. So she began going into her children's classrooms on a weekly basis to read and talk about stories and poetry.
"More children kept saying - `Can I do that?' and I thought `Why not?' " she recalls. "I sent out 1,000 fliers advertising what I called `Peewee Poetry.' I got 12 children, ages 2 to 6. We basically sat around and recited poetry; we took the language and played with it."
The children enjoyed it so much they began taking along brothers, sisters and friends. Eventually, she had 25 to 30 classes a week in the Detroit area. One day, Hajdusiewicz decided to try her hand at writing a poem.
"I started out with: `Let me tell you a story' because I didn't know how to begin," she says. "I continued with `of how old Mr. Bear/Almost went out in his underwear.' Underwear rhymes with bear, and also kids like anything that is a little bit risque."
While reciting "Mr. Bear" to children, something she has now done thousands of times over the years, Hajdusiewicz shakes her finger as she reads: "Mr. Bear! Mr. Bear! Now don't you dare go out of this cave in your underwear!"
"It's the kind of thing they want to hear over and over again," she says. "If you fill their pockets with poetry, they will make it theirs."
After getting the art of poetry under her belt, her next stab at writing occurred almost by accident. While attending a party, a woman asked Hajdusiewicz what she did for a living. She hesitantly replied: "I'm a writer." The woman asked her if she was looking for a job. It turned out the publishing company she worked for was looking for someone to write a reading series.
The result was her "Dainty Dinosaur" series (Modern Curriculum/Paramount, $6), an Easy Reader series for kindergarten through second grade.