My Early Experiences with Literacy

My earliest experiences with reading were those times when my parents would read to me before bed. Every night I would pick out books for my parents to read. I can only imagine how thrilled they were to come home from a long day of work and doing things around the house and see that I had 10 books picked out for them to read to me. They never complained though and they always read whatever it was that I had picked out for them. I had heard the Bernstein Bear books so many times I had almost everyone memorized. My dad would sometimes try to skip parts or change the story in order to make it go faster and I would, without fail, say,”Dad, read it right.” Obviously my parents were really happy when I could finally read for myself. In kindergarten our class of course learned all the letters and began trying to form them into words. Every day we would sit in front of the chalkboard and recite the letters the possible sounds they could make. This obviously did impact my literacy because it is what my literacy is built on but I think first grade had a much larger impact on my literacy.
While what we did in kindergarten was essential to my literacy I didn’t enjoy doing it. Once I got into first grade and actually started to learn to read that’s when literacy became a more important part of my life. Mrs. Hall was my first grade teacher and she was really great. She was goofy and made everything a game, something every first grader lovers. Every day in first grade Mrs. Hall would read to us from various chapter books. This was my favorite part of the day. She made us so involved sometimes she would have us act out what she was reading and she always had several voices for the different characters. This really made reading fun. She noticed how much I liked that part of the day and she started giving me different books to read. By the end of the year I had read almost the entire Bailey School Kids Series. Without this positive experience in reading I don’t think I would have learned to love reading the way I do.
My literacy and love of reading were in a slump during third grade. This was when the teachers started to assign books for us to read. Like any 8 year old I didn’t like being told what to do. My teacher was an old mean woman with absolutely no sense of humor and was about 10 years overdue for retirement. She would assign books and then we would talk them to death. She had very firm ideas about these books and what they meant and wouldn’t let us have any kind of interpretation of our own. This was my most negative experience with literacy and it wouldn’t be until high school that I would escape this reading rut.
I think all of these early experiences affected my view of literacy. Though I did have a negative experience early on I did overcome it. I think that the earlier positive experience with my parents and my first grade teacher where overall much more influential and lead to me later rediscovering my love for reading because it was instilled in me from the beginning.