Jim Trelease Quotes & Sayings

Imagine what our culture would be like if Americans sold ideas, words, and books with the same creativity we use to sell designer jeans, shampoo, and rock stars. Why, we might end up with people whos attention span for the printed word is longer than the time it takes to read a T-shirt. — Jim Trelease

Instead of educating the I.Q., we need to educate the H.Q., the heart quotient, the matters of truth, love, justice, and compassion. There are two ways to do this. One is through the read life experiences and the other is through literature. Literature has the power to take us outside ourselves and returns to ourselves a changed self. — Jim Trelease

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. — Jim Trelease

Reading aloud is the best advertisement because it works. It allows a child to sample the delights of reading and conditions him to believe that reading is a pleasureful experience, not a painful or boring one. — Jim Trelease

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

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. — Jim Trelease

No player in the NBA was born wanting to play basketball. The desire to play ball or to read must be planted. The last 25 years of research show that reading aloud to a child is the oldest, cheapest and must successful method of instilling that desire. Shooting baskets with a child creates a basketball player; reading to a child creates a reader. — Jim Trelease

You became a reader because you saw and heard someone you admired enjoying the experience, someone led you to the world of books even before you could read, let you taste the magic of stories, took you to the library, and allowed you to stay up later at night to read in bed. — Jim Trelease

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. — Jim Trelease

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

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

What happened to the classics?" you may ask. "Don't you believe in reading great literature to children?"
Nothing happened to the classics-but something happened to children: their imaginations went to sleep in front of the television set twenty-five years ago. Reading a classic to a child whose imagination is in a state of retarded development will not foster a love of literature in that child. — Jim Trelease

Which Country Has the Best Readers? One of the most comprehensive international reading studies was conducted by Warwick Elley for the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) in 1990 and 1991. Involving thirty-two countries, it assessed 210,000 nine- and fourteen-year-olds.22 Of all those children, which ones read best? For nine-year-olds, the four top nations were: Finland (569), the United States (547), Sweden (539), and France (531). But the U.S. position dropped to a tie for eighth when fourteen-year-olds were evaluated. This demonstrates that American children begin reading at a level that is among the best in the world, but since reading is an accrued skill and U.S. children appear to do less of it as they grow older, their scores decline when compared with countries where children read more as they mature. — Jim Trelease

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

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. — Jim Trelease

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

The more you read, the better you get, the more better you get, the more you like it; and the more you like it, the more you do it. — Jim Trelease

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

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.
And the more you read, the more you know;
and the more you know, the smarter you grow. — Jim Trelease

Common sense should tell us that reading is the ultimate weapon
destroying ignorance, poverty and despair before they can destroyus. A nation that doesn't read much doesn't know much. And a nation that doesn't know much is more likely to make poor choices in the home, the marketplace, the jury box and the voting booth ... The challenge, therefore, is to convince future generations of children that carrying a book is more rewarding than carrying guns. — Jim Trelease

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. — Jim Trelease

This is not a book about teaching a child how to read; it's about teaching a child to want to read. There's an education adage that goes, "What we teach children to love and desire will always outweigh what we make them learn." The fact is that some children learn to read sooner than others, while some learn better than others. There is a difference. For the parent who thinks that sooner is better, who has an eighteen-month-old child barking at flash cards, my response is: sooner is not better. Are the dinner guests who arrive an hour early better guests than those who arrive on time? Of course not. — Jim Trelease

We have instant pudding, instant photos, instant coffee - but there are no instant adults. — Jim Trelease

The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children. — Jim Trelease

A nation that does not read much does not know much. And a nation that does not know much is more likely to make poor choices in the home, the marketplace, the jury box, and the voting booth. And those decisions ultimately affect the entire nation ... the literate and illiterate. — Jim Trelease

The closest thing we have to a "crap detector" is a qualified librarian. — Jim Trelease

Students who read the most also read the best, achieve the most, and stay in school the longest. Conversely, those who dont read much cannot get better at it. — Jim Trelease

Each day millions of children arrive in American classrooms in search of more than reading and math skills. They are looking for a light in the darkness of their lives, a Good Samaritan who will stop and bandage a bruised heart or ego. — Jim Trelease

Children's books, even good picture books, are much richer than ordinary home or classroom conversation, — Jim Trelease

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. — Jim Trelease

If you don't read much, you really don't know much. You're dangerous. — Jim Trelease

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. — Jim Trelease