“The average student learns about 3,000 words per year in the early school years (8 words per day). – Baumann & Kameenui, 1991/ Beck & McKeown, 1991 / Graves, 1986

“The educational careers of 25 to 40 percent of American children are imperiled because they don’t read well enough, quickly enough, or easily enough.” – Committee on Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children of the National Research Council, 1998

“More than 20 percent of adults read at or below a fifth-grade level – far below the level needed to earn a living wage.” –National Institute for Literacy, Fast Facts on Literacy, 2001

“44 million adults in the U.S. can’t read well enough to read a simple story to a child.” – National Adult Literacy Survey (1992) NCED, U.S. Department of Education

 “The knowledge of almost every subject in school flows from reading.” – Jim Trelease

“Out-of-school reading habits of students has shown that even 15 minutes a day of independent reading can expose students to more than a million words of text in a year.”—Anderson, Wilson & Fielding, 1988

“Students who reported having all four types of reading materials (books, magazines, newspapers, encyclopedias) in their home scored, on average, higher than those who reported having fewer reading materials.” -- The National Center for Education Statisitics.

“First grade children with good word recognition were exposed to almost twice as many words in their basal readers as were children who had poor word recognition skills.” – Juel, 1988