38 Quotes by Jim Trelease

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.

When the daily number of words for each group of children is projected across four years, the four-year-old child from the professional family will have heard 45 million words, the working-class child 26 million, and the welfare child only 13 million.

The last thing you want first-graders thinking is that what they’re reading in first grade is as good as books are going to get!

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

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

More than nonfiction, fiction forces us to concentrate in order to find meaning, and therefore deepens our engagement and helps comprehension.

So I ask you: whose job is it in this country to wake up comatose parents? Someone better do it soon because knowing television’s potential for harm and keeping that knowledge to ourselves instead of sharing it with parents amounts to covering up a land mine on a busy street.

Children whose families take them to museums and zoos, who visit historic sites, who travel abroad, or who camp in remote areas accumulate huge chunks of background knowledge without even studying. For the impoverished child lacking the travel portfolio of affluence, the best way to accumulate background knowledge is by either reading or being read to.