Dorothy Bush Koch Quotes

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable.

As a father, I understand the importance of the bond that develops through reading picture books with your child.

Something like reading depends a lot on just having people around you who talk to you and read you books, more than sitting down and, say, doing a reading drill when you're 3 or 4 years old.

We know that reading to children is a crucial step. From the beginning, babies who are read to are exposed to the cadence of language, and school-age children who read at home for 15 minutes a day are exposed to millions of words.

If you read in front of your kids, it's very likely that they'll become readers, too.

With twins, reading aloud to them was the only chance I could get to sit down. I read them picture books until they were reading on their own.

A child needs to be listened to and talked to at 3 and 4 and 5 years of age. Parents should not wait for the sophisticated conversation of a teenager.

I think it's extremely important that children are exposed to reading.

Most people understand that the more words children are exposed to, the stronger their vocabularies will be. But fewer people are aware that the quality of the words also significantly affects brain development.

Babies aren't savages. Toddlers understand language long before they can talk.

In the Nineties, there was all this new research into brain development, with evidence saying poor kids fall behind in school because no one is talking to them at home, no one is reading to them. And middle-class parents seized on this research.

I listen to people talking sometimes, that great river that is language, with all its undercurrents of grammar and nuance, and I wonder how we all learn so quickly to speak it, given that we begin when we are barely old enough to stand upright. I have no memory of finding it hard. Indeed, I have no memory of it at all.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

Dr. [Paula] Menyuk and her co-workers [at Boston University's School of Education] found that parents who supplied babies with a steady stream of information were not necessarily helpful. Rather, early, rich language skills were more likely to develop when parents provided lots of opportunities for their infants and toddlers to "talk" and when parents listened and responded to the babies' communications.

You're never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.

Picture books are being marginalised. I get the feeling children are being pushed away from picture books earlier and earlier and being told to look at 'proper' books, which means books without pictures.

Childhood reading is so important.

As far as young kids go, my primary interest is to get parents to read to their kids. That's about the most you can do, I think.

If a child cannot speak English the first day at school, that child is not ready to learn.

Let's see to it that our children, our young people, learn English.

Having a larger vocabulary the day you walk into kindergarten is advantageous.

The social and educational value of preschool is undisputed.

People enjoy being read to, beginning from when they're little.

The child, merely by going on with his life, learns to speak the language belonging to his race. It is like a mental chemistry that takes place in the child.

I was lucky enough to have a mother who took me to the library - the public library - twice a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays. And also bought me books. And also read aloud to me.