Betty Smith Quotes

The home is the child's first school, the parent is the child's first teacher, and reading is the child's first subject.

You don't have to care about children to care about children. One of the things that I talk a lot about is the fact of the importance of third-grade reading level. By the end of third grade, if the child is not at reading level, it'll drop off. They never catch up.

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.

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

Research shows us that children who are read to from a very early age are more likely to begin reading themselves at an early age. They're more likely to excell in school. They're more likely to graduate secondary school and go to college.

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.

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

I learnt to read when I was five, and I think that is the most important thing that happened to me.

If children haven't been read to, they don't love books. They need to love books, for books are the basis of literature, composition, history, world events, vocabulary, and everything else.

I do think, where would kids be if it weren't for you and for the good pediatricians, and for the good parents? I passionately believe in sitting a child on your lap and tracing the lines of the book with your finger, and they can read before they know they can, if you bother enough. I did it with my kids, and they're doing it with their kids now.

Reading makes all other learning possible. We have to get books into our children's hands early and often.

We book people are always preaching about reading aloud to children, but unless you do, you can't realize how it enriches family life.

There is no such thing as doing the nuts and bolts of reading in Kindergarten through 5th grade without coherently developing knowledge in science, and history, and the arts…it is the deep foundation in rich knowledge and vocabulary depth that allows you to access more complex text.

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.

When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.

Just a little every day That's the way Children learn to read and write Bit by bit and mite by mite.

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

Reading to small children is a specialty.

Reading aloud and talking about what we're reading sharpens children's brains. It helps develop their ability to concentrate at length, to solve problems logically, and to express themselves more easily and clearly.

For the first two years of a child's life, we spend every waking hour tryibg to get the child to communicate. Then we spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out how we can reverse the process.

If you want to work on the core problem, it's early school literacy.

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.

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.

Reading might not be the way that the child engages with the world, but it should be something that they all learn how to do, and that they get to have for themselves, as opposed to somebody telling them what to do and how to do it.