Daliyah Arana has been reading since she was 3 years old.
The rising second-grader from Gainesville skipped kindergarten and went straight to first grade, teaching other children in her class at Fair Street International Academy to read. Now, she’ll have a wider audience as she appears on Steve Harvey’s “Little Big Shots” at 8 p.m. June 28 on NBC.
“It’s basically just a habit,” said her mother, Haleema Arana. “I was basically reading to her siblings on a daily basis … and basically, after she was born, she just joined in and fell in love with it after that.”
On the show, she’ll be talking about her love for reading, the importance of it and how she got to where she is at just 6 years old.
To date, she’s read over 2,000 books, which helped her get an invite to the Library of Congress to be “librarian for a day” in January 2017.
Just over a year later and she’s trying to help her 11-month-old brother read. Her mother said she can’t help it, “it’s in her blood.”
She’s already appeared on the “Steve Harvey” television show, but this time, she’ll show a little more of what she likes now.
She used to read books about dinosaurs, but Daliyah Arana has moved on to more sophisticated books, like chapter books and Greek mythology, her mother said. She’s interested in unicorns, too.
Even though she’s appearing on TV shows now, she has high aspirations for the future. She doesn’t only want to read for the rest of her life, she wants to study the things that got her interested in reading in the first place.
“She wants to be a paleontologist or archaeologist,” Haleema Arana said.
Little Big Shots
When: 8 p.m. Thursday, June 28
Channel: NBC