38 Quotes by Jim Trelease

If you don’t read much, you really don’t know much. You’re dangerous.

Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire.

Like Scout and her father in To Kill a Mockingbird, my father would pull me onto his lap each night in our four-room apartment and read aloud.

In a similar experiment involving reading to fetuses during the two and a half months before birth, DeCasper found the child’s heartbeat increased with a new story and decreased with a familiar one.

Story is the vehicle we use to make sense of our lives in a world that often defies logic.

Skill sheets, workbooks, basal reader, flash cards are not enough. To convey meaning you need someone sharing the meaning and flavor of real stories with the student.

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.

Amid the push to excellence, with its measurement and accountability, it is easy to lose sight of a key ingredient in reading a book – the pleasure it bring us, something too many boil down to a dirty word: FUN.

Neither books nor people have Velcro Sides – there must be a bonding agent – someone who attaches child to book.