When I was young, my parents had a library in our living room. I was always free to browse and read.
When the child begins to think and to make use of the written language to express his rudimentary thinking, he is ready for elementary work; and this fitness is a question not of age or other incidental circumstance but of mental maturity.
I want children to learn to develop deep reading skills in the beginning in print. I believe the physicality of print is much better in the beginning for children, and then help them learn how to use their deep reading skills on digital medium.
Language instruction should start in the first grade. Writing, also.
You're never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.
I did start reading quite young but I was always read to by my parents, who are both actors. Bedtime stories from when I was about two/three to when I was about 15. In fact they didn't stop until I eventually kind of kicked them out of my bedroom.
I was a very avid reader when I was a child, and I also was a good listener.
Writing, for me, really started in the '70s as a young child. I used to read a lot of nursery rhymes, and I learned a lot of those rhymes word for word.
My mother had been an English teacher in India before she came to the U.K., and she taught me to read early on - not only in English, but in Hindi, too. My teachers didn't like the fact that I was reading more quickly than they were teaching, and as a consequence, I would sometimes get bored in class.
When I was in kindergarten, I entered a competition and read 52 books in a week.
I remember being taught to read at a very early age. Like creepy young. I remember being in the crib, reading. My parents were very impressed. My reading speed, comprehension and overall ability has remained at that level ever since.
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.
Parents should be encouraged to read to their children, and teachers should be equipped with all available techniques for teaching literacy, so the varying needs and capacities of individual kids can be taken into account.
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.
If learning to read was as easy as learning to talk, as some writers claim, many more children would learn to read on their own. The fact that they do not, despite their being surrounded by print, suggests that learning to read is not a spontaneous or simple skill.
When I was 7, my proudest possession would have been my bookshelf 'cause I had alphabetized all of the books on my bookshelf.
If children are reading well by the 3rd or 4th grade then everything else works.
I had begun reading earlier than most because my sister Emmy Lou, no doubt to keep me from bothering her, decided it was easier to teach me to read stories to myself rather than to read them to me, as she had been doing.
I started reading when I was about three, a little over three.
Let's put in place programs to ensure that all of our children are reading by third grade.
If you read in front of your kids, it's very likely that they'll become readers, too.
My mother taught me to read before I went to school, so I was pretty bored in school, and I turned into a little terror. You should have seen us in third grade. We basically destroyed our teacher. We would let snakes loose in the classroom and explode bombs.
When I was one day old, I learned how to read. When I was two days old, I started to write. By the time I was three, I had finished 212 short stories, 38 novels, 730 poems, and one very funny limerick, all before breakfast.
When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.
I have an aunt who believed strongly that teaching kids that Shakespeare is 'hard' is wrong, so she handed me 'Hamlet' when I was in kindergarten to see what would happen. What happened was I did a book report on 'Hamlet' and caused quite a lot of trouble!
