Alexander Pope Quotes

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.

Play reaches the habits most needed for intellectual growth.

If you just, pretty much, take a random 15-month-old, just sit and watch them for 10 minutes and count out how many experiments, how much thinking you see going on, and it will put the most brilliant scientist to shame.

Experts in literacy and child development have discovered that if children know eight nursery rhymes by heart by the time they’re four years old, they’re usually among the best readers by the time they’re eight.

If we allow our one-and-a-half year old to "help" us fold laundry he will learn something about buttons, zippers, snaps, where things go, the physical properties of cloth, what happens when you drop it, how easy or hard it is to carry compared with everything else he has ever carried, what clean clothes smell like, how a big towel can turn into a small bundle, how the small bundle you just folded can turn into a big towel again, plus any songs we care to sing or stories or related or unrelated facts we care to pass on.

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

The child begins to perceive the world not only through his [or her] eyes but also through his [or her] speech

In some small field each child should attain, within the limited range of its experience and observation, the power to draw a justly limited inference from observed facts.

A child starts from nothing and advances alone. It is the child's reason about which the sensitive periods revolve. The reason provides the initial force and energy, and a child absorbs his first images to assist the reason and act on it.

Children who are read to learn two things: First, that reading is worthwhile, and second, that they are worthwhile.

Scientists and philosophers tend to treat knowledge, imagination and love as if they were all very separate parts of human nature. But when it comes to children, all three are deeply entwined. Children learn the truth by imagining all the ways the world could be, and testing those possibilities.

Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.

I kind of picked up the game at an early age. The way that other kids would learn what a fork or a spoon is.

Early childhood education begins early, even before birth.

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

Every game has to teach you how to walk, run, talk, use.

In play, a child is always above his average age, above his daily behavior; in play, it is as though he were a head taller than himself.

It is probable that there is no one thing that it is of eminent importance for a child to learn.

Get to know your kids' minds and how they think.

Creativity is the key to success in the future, and primary education is where teachers can bring creativity in children at that level.

Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.

Children need to be exploring their physical world. They need to be learning the fundamental laws of physics by manipulating objects.

There are plenty of skills I've learned from playing video games. It's more interactive than watching TV, because there are problems to solve as you're using your brain.

The human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to learn.

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