Quotes from Jim Trelease

Follow the suggestion of Dr. Caroline Bauer and post a reminder sign by your door: "Don't Forget Your Flood Book." Analogous to emergency rations in case of natural disasters, "flood" books should be taken along in the car or even stored like spares in the trunk. A few chapters from these books can be squeezed into traffic jams on the way to the beach or long waits at the doctor's office.

So how do we educate the heart? There are really only two ways: life experience and stories about life experience, which is called literature. Great preachers and teachers—Aesop, Socrates, Confucius, Moses, and Jesus—have traditionally used stories to get their lesson plans across, educating both the mind and the heart.

Visual receptors in the brain outnumber auditory receptors 30:1.32 In other words, the chances of a word (or sentence) being retained in our memory bank are thirty times greater if we see it instead of just hear it.

The more you read, the better you get at it; the better you get at it, the more you like it; and the more you like it, the more you do it.

If there were a national time shortage, the malls would be empty, Netflix would be defunct, and the cable-TV companies would be bankrupt.

Every time we read to a child, we're sending a 'pleasure' message to the child's brain. You could even call it a commercial, conditioning the child to associate books and print with pleasure.

What we teach children to love and desire will always outweigh what we make them learn.

Readers don't grow in trees. But they are grown-in places where they are fertilized with lots of print, and above all, read to daily.

Sector 7 by David Wiesner (Clarion, 1997)

What is meant to be heard is necessarily more direct in expression, and perhaps more boldly coloured, than what is meant for the reader.

There should be no rush to have a child reading before age six or seven. That's developmentally the natural time.

You need the combination of know-how and motivation.

since the first edition of this book, much has changed in the world and in American education. And so, too, this book

of those differences, there are some things that remain the same. In 1982, the U.S. economy was in its worst recession since the Great Depression, and the nation's business leaders were looking for someone or something to blame. Sound familiar? Since SAT scores had been in a twenty-year decline (because lots of average and below-average students, and not just the rich kids, were taking the

Which teacher has the bigger influence? Where is more time available for change? Those two numbers—900 and 7,800—will appear over and over in this book.

The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared

From 2,272 text messages a month in 2008, American teenagers (ages 13–17) ballooned to 3,339 messages a month in 2010, an average of six per waking hour. Simply put, students in one of the most formative periods of their intellectual and emotional lives are interrupted 118 times a day for messages, totaling 90 minutes.

Vocabulary and coherent sentences can't be downloaded onto paper unless they've first been uploaded to the head by reading

The prime purpose of being four is to enjoy being four - of secondary importance is to prepare for being five.