So I ask you: whose job is it in this country to wake up comatose parents? Someone better do it soon because knowing television’s potential for harm and keeping that knowledge to ourselves instead of sharing it with parents amounts to covering up a land mine on a busy street.
You became a reader because you saw and heard someone you admired enjoying the experience, someone led you to the world of books even before you could read, let you taste the magic of stories, took you to the library, and allowed you to stay up later at night to read in bed.
The more you read, the better you get; the better you get, the more you like it; and the more you like it, the more you do it.
The prime purpose of being four is to enjoy being four – of secondary importance is to prepare for being five.
Reading aloud is the best advertisement because it works. It allows a child to sample the delights of reading and conditions him to believe that reading is a pleasureful experience, not a painful or boring one.
Readers don’t grow on trees. But they are grown in places where they are fertilized with lots of print, and above all, read to daily.
Like Scout and her father in To Kill a Mockingbird, my father would pull me onto his lap each night in our four-room apartment and read aloud.
Skill sheets, workbooks, basal reader, flash cards are not enough. To convey meaning you need someone sharing the meaning and flavor of real stories with the student.
Story is the vehicle we use to make sense of our lives in a world that often defies logic.
Every time we read to a child, we’re sending a ‘pleasure’ message to the child’s brain. You could even call it a commercial, conditioning the child to associate books and print with pleasure.
Amid the push to excellence, with its measurement and accountability, it is easy to lose sight of a key ingredient in reading a book – the pleasure it bring us, something too many boil down to a dirty word: FUN.
Neither books nor people have Velcro Sides – there must be a bonding agent – someone who attaches child to book.
If you don’t read much, you really don’t know much. You’re dangerous.
We have instant pudding, instant photos, instant coffee – but there are no instant adults.
What we teach children to love and desire will always outweigh what we make them learn.