Childhood Literacy Quotes

It's really important for kids to read right through childhood but I know sometimes it's hard to get them to read. The key is finding something that they're passionate about, and for me it was, and still is rugby, and being healthy and active, and a lot of kids are like that too.

I read a great deal as a child. A lot of children go through a phase of reading in a literally voracious way. It is their primary imaginative activity. Maybe that's an experience which is not so common any more with the presence of television in every home.

I don't remember being taught to read, and by the time I was seven years old, I had read a very great many books, good, bad, and indifferent.

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

I learned to read from Mrs. Augusta Baker, the children's librarian. ... If that was the only good deed that lady ever did in her life, may she rest in peace. Because that deed saved my life, if not sooner, then later, when sometimes the only thing I had to hold on to was knowing I could read.

Unfortunately, a lot of kids don't read anymore. I don't know what we can do about that.

The idea there were kids out there who didn't love to read and write just as much as I did struck me. So I went around schools and tried to make other kids love to read and write.

I could read at a very early age and I loved stories, losing myself in stories, novels.

The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading.

Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.

Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves.

I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.

Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.

It's such a wonderful feeling to watch a child discover that reading is a marvelous adventure rather than a chore. I know that many writers for children say they do not write specifically with a child audience in mind ... This isn't true for me. I am very aware of my audience. Sometimes I can almost see them out there reacting as I write. Sometimes I think, 'Oh, you're going to like this part.

We must meet children as equals in that area of our nature where we are their equals...The child as reader is neither to be patronized nor idolized: we talk to him as man to man.

Well meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading - do not discourage children from reading because you feel they're reading the wrong thing. There is no such thing as the wrong thing to be reading and no bad fiction for kids.

Literacy is much more than an educational priority - it is the ultimate investment in the future and the first step towards all the new forms of literacy required in the twenty-first century. We wish to see a century where every child is able to read and to use this skill to gain autonomy.

Growing up, my parents managed to show me the importance of reading without cramming it down my throat. A difficult task, I'm sure. It breaks my heart to think that there are kids out there, ready to have their imaginations lit on fire, excited and wanting to read, and facing naked shelves in their school or local libraries. Rather than complain or wait till the system stops failing our nation's children this is a matter I feel we must take into our own hands. There are children, right now, waiting-wanting to read. What shall we tell them>

For a lot of kids, reading is not magical. It's really hard work.

If you ask, you're a boor. Just accept it. Hillry Clinton loves children! She helped children! She village'd children. She raised children. She wrote a book about it.

One of my passions is that children enjoy their time at school - and reading for pleasure can be an important part of that.

Reading with children is an enormous gift to them. It's a great honor to invite children to read with adults.

As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read.

Pretty much every night of their lives, my 8-year-old sons have absorbed themselves entirely in books. As toddlers, they pointed out pictures, made conjectures; lately, we find them in their bunk beds embarked upon two-hour comic-reading benders.

Growing up, I read all three of Frederick Douglass' autobiographies by the time I was 12.