Reading Instruction Quotes

Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different.

The fastest way to teach a child to read is to teach them to write.

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.

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.

Too many of our children cannot read. Reading is the building block, and it must be the foundation for education reform.

I realize, of course, that I wasn't born knowing how to read. I just can't imagine a time when I didn't know how.

I wouldn't be a very good writer if someone hadn't taught me how to read.

President Bush said that our kids must be taught how to read. He said if his aides never learned to read, they'd never be able to tell him what's in the newspapers every day.

Johnny can get down and Johnny can throw up, but Johnny can't read.

The elementary school must assume as its sublime and most solemn responsibility the task of teaching every child in it to read. Any school that does not accomplish this has failed.

We want our teachers to be trained so they can meet the obligations, their obligations as teachers. We want them to know how to teach the science of reading. In order to make sure there's not this kind of federal-federal cufflink.

You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.

Children have to be motivated to want to learn to read. Reading must not be taught simply as a school exercise.

An important aspect of the current situation is the strong social reaction against suggestions that the home language of African American children be used in the first steps of learning to read and write.

I'm trying to learn how to read. I have a tutor out on the road. It is great.

Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don't believe that, watch an illiterate adult try to do it.

A nonreader is somebody standing there in a blindfold.

Turn to page three hundred and ninety-four.

My grandmother taught me how to read, very early, but she taught me to read just the way she taught herself how to read - she read words rather than syllables. And as a result of that, when I entered school, it took me a long time to learn how to write.

I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.

If I had my way no one should be taught to read until after he had passed his hundredth year. In that way, and in that way only can we protect our youth from the dreadful influence of such novels as 'Three Cycles, Not To Mention The Rug,' which dreadful book I have found within the past month in the hands of at least twenty children in the neighborhood, not one of whom was past sixty.