People always say you should soar like an eagle, right? But why not fly like a flamingo? Yes, it is true. Flamingoes fly. They fly at night. But that isn’t the point of this story. The point of this story is to be happy with the person you are. You have many gifts, and you should be ready to use them all. The most important gift you have is that you are you. Being happy with the person you are means no matter what, you will be happy your whole life! Penelope Dyan brings this concept home and reinforces basic reading skills through repetition and rhyme. If a young child doesn’t know a word, the child can guess what it is by the context of the rhyme. Let your child finish a phrase if you are reading to him, because out of the poetry your child will make sense of the sense of the rhyme; and your child will read! Penelope Dyan is an award winning poet and author, an attorney and former teacher who has written a lot of books for kids, each book encouraging creativity as it enforces basic reading skills. This is plain old fashioned teaching, and it’s not based on gimmicks of any kind. As a teacher, Dyan proved this system works; and that it is the best way to really teach children to read and to understand what they are reading. Comprehension skills increase when your child isn’t just reading a bunch of meaningless, strung together words that really have no importance or meaning at all. Dyan contends the reason kids really don’t like reading is that they aren’t having any fun reading. They read to please their parents and not for the joy of reading, so as soon as they can stop reading, they stop reading. This doesn’t happen if kids have fun reading. Having fun reading is what really matters. If you have fun reading, you read. If you read, you learn.