(Newswire.net — January 16, 2017) –Daliyah Marie Arana of Gainesville is a 4-year-old girl who has read more than 1,000 books.
Her mother, Haleema Arana, said in an interview with The Washington Post, that Daliyah first began to recognize words while her parents were reading the books to her. She was only 18-months-old.
“She wanted to take over and do the reading on her own,” Haleema Arana said and added: “It kind of took off from there. The more words she learned, the more she wanted to read.”
Daliyah was two-years old and eleven months when she finished reading her first book entirely on her own.
Now, this smart girl with incredible reading skills and passion for literature, is four years old, and she read, with the help of her mother, more than a thousand books. Also, she has managed to read certain college-level texts.
Recently, she received an invitation to visit the institution that she always dreamed of – the Library of Congress (LOC) in Washington D.C. It is the largest library in the world, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States, which contains 160,775,469 items in total, with 23,892,068 items being catalogued books.
On January 14th, the 4-year-old smarty in a pink dress and matching pink bow, walked the sprawling hallways of the library. Her host was Dr. Carla Hayden, the first woman as well as the first African American who made history this year as she became the Librarian of Congress.
Daliyah was so happy and excited, and when members of the library staff asked her for recommendations and ideas how to improve the library experience, Daliyah immediately suggested them to install whiteboards in the hallways, so that children can practice their writing skills on them.
Of course, this was not the first time that this girl visited a library. The young bookworm goes very often to her local library in Gainesville, the Hall County Library. She has her own library card, of course.
Daliyah’s mother explained that her favorite writer is Mo Willems, the author of books “Pigeon and Elephant” and “Piggie” series, but also that she has a special interest in dinosaurs.