4 yr. old reads at college level

[waltky]

This 4-year-old reading prodigy reads COLLEGE LEVEL speech!...

Preschooler dazzles librarians by reading 1,000 books by age 4
Jan 14th, 2017 — Reading 1,000 books is no small feat, especially when you’re just in preschool.

Four-year-old Daliyah Marie Arana loves to read. She dove into the written word much earlier than most — from the time she was 18 months old, she began identifying words on her own, according to the Gainsville Times. “I have two other small children too,” Daliyah’s mom, Haleema Arana, said. “So she’d heard us reading stories to them as well. We would literally read every day, about 15-20 minutes a day.” Just before her third birthday, she read her first book solo. “She wanted to take over and do the reading on her own,” Arana told the Washington Post. “It kind of took off from there. The more words she learned, the more she wanted to read.” While she’s never been officially tested for skill level, Daliyah managed to decipher a college-level speech, the Post reports. A YouTube video of her reading “The Pleasure of Books,” by William Lyon Phelps, has garnered more than 55,000 views.

Daliyah’s love for books inspired her parents to sign their then-2-year-old up for the 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten program, which encourages parents to keep track of how many books they’ve read to and with their children in the years leading up to kindergarten. Arana told the Washington Post that it took just a year for her daughter to meet the goal, and that doesn’t even take into account the estimated 1,000 books they’d already read before entering the program. The little girl — who’s already settled on a future career as a librarian — has her own library card at her local branch, according to the Gainsville Times.

While she’s become a bit of a celebrity in her home town, Daliyah recently grabbed the nation’s attention when she was invited to be the “Librarian for the Day” at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Earlier this week, Carla Hayden — the country’s first female and first African-American national librarian — tweeted photos of Daliyah exploring the largest library in the world. “She just kept saying how the Library of Congress is her most favorite, favorite, favorite library in the whole wide world,” Arana told the Washington Post. Daliyah even offered a few suggestions on how to make the nation’s library even better, asking Hayden to bring in whiteboards to line some of the hallways so kids could practice writing new words, according to the Post.

Daliyah’s visit may be over, but her dreams have just begun. She plans to read another 500 books before she starts kindergarten this fall, and hopes to be able to teach other kids to love reading as much as she does. “I want to teach other kids to read at an early age, too,” she told the Gainsville Times. So what's the secret to shaping your own tiny reader? Early exposure, according to her mother. “Their little brains are absorbing so much," Arana said. "They’ll just soak it up.” Daliyah will take a break from her books for a few hours this weekend — she’s been asked to recite the “I Have a Dream” speech in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. at an MLK Day celebration in her town, the Post reported.

Preschooler dazzles librarians by reading 1,000 books by age 4 | KSL.com

 

[usmbguest5318]

This 4-year-old reading prodigy reads COLLEGE LEVEL speech!

Let's be honest. That speech/essay is not college level. It's between ninth and eleventh grade as goes reading level, which is nonetheless damned impressive if Daliyah actually comprehends what she's reading. It's more than sufficiently impressive that there's no need to exaggerate the nature of her achievement.

Here's the essay:

The habit of reading is one of the greatest resources of mankind; and we enjoy reading books that belong to us much more than if they are borrowed. A borrowed book is like a guest in the house; it must be treated with punctiliousness, with a certain considerate formality. You must see that it sustains no damage; it must not suffer while under your roof. You cannot leave it carelessly, you cannot mark it, you cannot turn down the pages, you cannot use it familiarly. And then, some day, although this is seldom done, you really ought to return it.

But your own books belong to you; you treat them with that affectionate intimacy that annihilates formality. Books are for use, not for show; you should own no book that you are afraid to mark up, or afraid to place on the table, wide open and face down. A good reason for marking favorite passages in books is that this practice enables you to remember more easily the significant sayings, to refer to them quickly, and then in later years, it is like visiting a forest where you once blazed a trail. You have the pleasure of going over the old ground, and recalling both the intellectual scenery and your own earlier self.

Everyone should begin collecting a private library in youth; the instinct of private property, which is fundamental in human beings, can here be cultivated with every advantage and no evils. One should have one's own bookshelves, which should not have doors, glass windows, or keys; they should be free and accessible to the hand as well as to the eye. The best of mural decorations is books; they are more varied in color and appearance than any wallpaper, they are more attractive in design, and they have the prime advantage of being separate personalities, so that if you sit alone in the room in the firelight, you are surrounded with intimate friends. The knowledge that they are there in plain view is both stimulating and refreshing. You do not have to read them all. Most of my indoor life is spent in a room containing six thousand books; and I have a stock answer to the invariable question that comes from strangers. "Have you read all of these books?"
"Some of them twice." This reply is both true and unexpected.

There are of course no friends like living, breathing, corporeal men and women; my devotion to reading has never made me a recluse. How could it? Books are of the people, by the people, for the people. Literature is the immortal part of history; it is the best and most enduring part of personality. But book-friends have this advantage over living friends; you can enjoy the most truly aristocratic society in the world whenever you want it. The great dead are beyond our physical reach, and the great living are usually almost as inaccessible; as for our personal friends and acquaintances, we cannot always see them. Perchance they are asleep, or away on a journey. But in a private library, you can at any moment converse with Socrates or Shakespeare or Carlyle or Dumas or Dickens or Shaw or Barrie or Galsworthy. And there is no doubt that in these books you see these men at their best. They wrote for you. They "laid themselves out," they did their ultimate best to entertain you, to make a favorable impression. You are necessary to them as an audience is to an actor; only instead of seeing them masked, you look into their innermost heart of heart.
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Paste it into a readability scoring site like this one to see the reading level.