Learning To Read

                As a child I learned to do many things such as talk, crawl, walk, tie my shoes, and read.    One of the most important was learning to read!   My mom, who teaches kindergarten, believes children learn to read sitting on the laps of their parents. She says she read to me since I was a little baby.   I was given books at a very early age and always had the opportunity to buy books that interested me. 

              When I was three years old, I went to a preschool program at the First United Methodist Church in West Memphis.  This is where I learned my alphabet letters.  At four, I also attended preschool at Avondale Elementary School and learned that these letters had sounds.

             I started kindergarten at Avondale Elementary and had a really good teacher.  She loved to read to us and wanted us to love to read ourselves.  We learned to read using a program called Distar. In Distar we learned how to blend letter sounds to make new words. Distar was easy to me. With my mother being a teacher and my grandmother being a principal I always had access to lots of reading tools and activities.   With these three ladies teaching me all I needed to know, I excelled through kindergarten.

            I also had a great teacher the next year in first grade.   She taught us how to read and write bigger words.   We also started to read real books in first grade. (We read some stories in kindergarten, but the stories we read in kindergarten were not real books, they were books that a company wrote to help us learn how to read. )  In first grade we also learned how to read and write paragraphs.                                                                                                                                     

              In second grade I had a wonderful teacher. This year was also the start of a program called Accelerated Reader. I enjoyed reading for points and prizes and I was one of the top readers of my class for reading.  In the Accelerated Reader program you would read books and then take tests on the book.  Points were awarded depending on how challenging the book was.  The Accelerated Reader program also tracked the types of books and the difficulty of the books read.   To start, I was reading small one point and half point books, and every once and a while I would try a two or three point book. My teacher also assigned you a number of points that you had to have at the end of the nine weeks.  We would be given class time each day to read these books.  I remember reading with my parents before bed and in the car as we drove to and from school trying to reach my goal.  At the end of each nine weeks it would all pay off and I would get to enjoy the AR Party.   This program continued through my seventh grade year. 
              Learning to read does not happen over night and is not taught by one person.   It is the result of many learning experiences and develops over many years.