I was the most Australian child ever in the world, even though my home was in Africa.
The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading.
The fastest way to teach a child to read is to teach them to write.
Books don’t harm kids; they arm them.
If you are not a writer, you will not understand the difficulties of writing. If you are not a writer, you will not know the fears and hopes of the writers you teach.
You experience other cultures to give you a kind of shock that makes you look at your own culture. You appreciate it more as a result of being out of it, but you also realise there are some things lacking in your culture.
I realized with grief that purposeless activities in language arts are probably the burial grounds of language development and that coffins can be found in most classrooms, including mine.
I don’t go to church much anymore, but Methodist values still wind me up and send me ticking into my daily life.
You’re not lonely when you’re teaching, you’re not quiet, you’re laughing most of the time, you’re having a wonderful time interacting with young people. It’s the best fun in the world.
I made a lot of friends at school, and they were all Africans. I could have felt very different. I didn’t feel different, I didn’t notice the color of their skin, I didn’t notice the color of my skin and I have remembered that all my life.
I don’t know why some people have children at all if they know that they can only take a few weeks off work.
I think that my favourite animal is a baby possum, or a joey. The face of a really little joey is so divine – so, so gorgeous.
As everyone knows, nothing is sweeter than tiny baby fingers and chubby baby toes.
DO NOT attempt to bring up other people’s children through your text.
My mother was a very difficult woman to please. She was the sort of woman who thought that if I were praised I would get above myself.
I think sometimes we rush through countries, ticking off the attractions, but that’s missing the point.
Babies have much higher levels of stress in childcare.
My Mother was a very wild Australian woman. When we were in Africa she could kill a snake with one blow from a crow bar, which she kept at the back door.
Writing a picture book is like writing ‘War and Peace’ in Haiku.
I have very little patience with children.