“People say, 'All my son will read is 'Captain Underpants,' or 'My son is crazy about shark books, is that O.K.?' I want to be the person to say, 'Yeah, that's really O.K., as long as he's motivated to want to read.'”
“The big problem is just this kind of gigantic piece, of kids reading less and liking it less and so getting worse at it. It's kind of this terrible spiral: Since they're not so good at it they do less of it, get worse at it, do less of it. And it's really what I discovered five, six years ago when I started the 'Guys Read' thing.”
“Be a good reading role model. Show kids what you like to read, what you don't like to read, how you choose what you read. Let them see you reading.”
“Read as much as you can, and then sit down and write.”
“I'm just trying to get kids motivated to be readers by connecting them with a book they like.”
“For a lot of kids, reading is not magical. It's really hard work.”
“I believe that all blogs should have at least one set of rhyming words. Just because. Does. Fuzz. Was.”
“Jeff Kinney's 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' series and Stephenie Meyer's 'Twilight' books got 49,323,701 kids reading.”
“When I read the 'Dick and Jane' stories, I thought they were afraid they might forget each other's names because they always said each other's names - a lot. So if Jane didn't see the dog, Dick would say, 'Look Jane, look. There is the dog next to Sally, Jane. The dog is also next to mother, Jane. The dog is next to father, Jane.'”
“We're promoting such a narrow version of literacy that we're not including what a lot of boys like.”