David Coleman Quotes

Learning through the arts reinforces critical academic skills in reading, language arts and math, and provides students with the skills to creatively solve problems.

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

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

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.

Little children can learn anything, just as they can learn a foreign language. The mind is so absorbent then. There ought to be a real program to educate teachers who want to teach grade school children about history.

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

My earliest memory is learning to read 'Muffin the Mule' when I was about three.

You have to be literate in today's world. We're not going to get away with not teaching boys to 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.

I'm a great believer that the most important years are the sort of early years but the preschool years and then into the first and second grades. If you get a good base in the first and second grade and you can read, you can do anything.

Learning can take place in the backyard if there is a human being there who cares about the child. Before learning computers, children should learn to read first. They should sit around the dinner table and hear what their parents have to say and think.

Kids who are poor often have families that have not really been kept informed about... how important it is to read to your child, to reduce stresses in their life, to use positive incentives and words.

Every book is a children's book if the kid can read!

I did not even go to kindergarten; I just started first grade when I was five and started reading right away. I don't know how it all worked, but I had a lot of adults and older siblings around me. So, I guess I was probably introduced to what one would be introduced to at that time in kindergarten.

A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.

The manner in which I learned to read and write, not only had great influence on my own mind, as I acquired it with the most perfect ease, so much so, that I have no recollection whatever of learning the alphabet

I cannot remember not being able to read.

One way to ensure that all kids will be successful in school and life is by focusing on literacy by the end of the third grade.

We humans invented literacy, which means it doesn't come for free with our genes like speech and vision. Every brain has to learn it afresh.

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

Language instruction should start in the first grade. Writing, also.

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.

When you learn to read you will be born again...and you will never be quite so alone again.