Kristi Yamaguchi Quotes

We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional.

If a big person invests time in reading, kids learn reading is important, the child is important, words are important, stories are important.

Now, my mom did not read well and she read 'True Romance' magazines, but she read with me. And she would spend 30 minutes a day, her finger going along the page, and I learned to read. Eventually, by the time I was four and a half, she could iron and I could sit there and read the 'True Romance.' And that was wonderful.

Anything that gets children reading is fine.

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

If children are reading well by the 3rd or 4th grade then everything else works.

I started reading when I was about three, a little over three.

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity.

If my books can help children become readers, then I feel I have accomplished something important.

No skill shapes a child's future success in school or in life more than the ability to read.

Well, I can't remember not being able to read. I was told I could read by myself very well at the age of three.

I don't want to approach reading from the viewpoint of that it's a pleasant adjunct to your life. I want to approach it from the idea that you have to read or you're going to suffer. There's a difference to be made - and you can make it if you read with your child.

I was passionate about reading from an early age, and I would always be carrying a different book each week.

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.

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.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

I am glad to say that I used to read a lot right from a young age.

Obviously, every child should be given the best possible opportunity to acquire literacy skills.

With reading, I was very lucky. I had a mother who read to me, not because she had time - she was a busy woman - but she found 10 minutes to come and sit on my bed with a book.

It distresses me that parents insist that their children read or make them read. The best way for children to treasure reading is to see the adults in their lives reading for their own pleasure.

I am very much interested in getting parents to read to children, and trying to get people mentoring children. If I can do both I'll be happy.

Like measles, the reading bug is best caught when you are young.

I seemed to have been born reading.

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

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