Writing a picture book is like writing 'War and Peace' in Haiku.

The fastest way to teach a child to read is to teach them to write.

Babies have much higher levels of stress in childcare.

The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading. It isn’t achieved by the book alone, nor by the child alone, nor by the adult who’s reading aloud—it’s the relationship winding between all three, bringing them together in easy harmony.

If every parent understood the huge educational benefits and intense happiness brought about by reading aloud to their children, and if every parent- and every adult caring for a child-read aloud a minimum of three stories a day to the children in our lives, we could probably wipe out illiteracy within one generation.

I realized with grief that purposeless activities in language arts are probably the burial grounds of language development and that coffins can be found in most classrooms, including mine.

I think that my favourite animal is a baby possum, or a joey. The face of a really little joey is so divine - so, so gorgeous.