She said that learning to read this type of lit starts early and to read to our daughter (above her level) so that she can hear it. We have done some of this, but I have been lax lately. This really scared me that our culture is going to only modern books.
I bought a set of books a long time ago when my daughter was little called The Harvard Classics. My daughter was not interested in reading them, but my son really liked listening to me read Aesop's Fables when he was three or four years old. When he was five or six and had to do a character study for some characters in Hamlet for his musical theater class and he did not have a problem with the vocabulary, but he started talking like a Shakespearean actor and would remain "in character" through the gymnastics class he was in at the time. I think it was one of the reasons the new teacher gymnastics teacher seemed to be annoyed by him. The old teacher acted like she thought it was cute and went along with it.
