Learning To Read Essay

In an isolated corner in my living room lays an important foundation of my life. It is the wooden bookshelf that contains stories of happiness, sadness, mystery, and action. The wooden bookshelf that my younger self would spend hours and hours by, reading new stories, even if I wasn’t quite old enough to comprehend the material. The wooden bookshelf that now accumulates dust and debris as it is used just for putting books in, never taken out, never to be read. As I look back on my life, indulging in the nostalgia, I can recall the excitement and frustration of learning how to read and write, actions that can now be easily done without a second thought.

As a child I can vividly remember my father and mother reading me princess stories to fall

These stories would inspire my creativity as I often told or wrote stories of how I would meet my prince charming and live in a castle with unicorns and talking animals. When I interviewed my mother I had asked her the generic questions such as “How old was I when I started to read?”and “Did I like to read?” According to my mother in my video she said that I able to read at the age of two, but after asking her again, because I knew that I was not some English prodigy, she meant that I knew how to read and recite the alphabet fully when I was 2. I do know that from Kindergarten to second grade I went to an after school program called Kumon and I was enrolled in the reading program. This helped me to further my interest in reading and increase my reading skills. Every Tuesday and Friday I would walk from school to the center, check in to get my assignments, and read a new book for 30 minutes. I grew up with The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, Where the Wild Things Are, and The Giving Tree. One of the books in particular that I remember, and that I have at my house, is titled Something Special by David

Throughout middle school I loved to read in my free time and I was still reading fictional stories that were either fantasy based, such as the Spiderwick Chronicles or Witch and Wizard, or were the good old simple slice of life books, such as Dork Diaries or the Luv Ya Bunches series. I vicariously lived through the characters, putting myself in the shoes of the main character almost as if I was first handedly experiencing everything that was happening in the stories. I would be so attached to the novels because I was just so enamoured by what I was reading, that when I finished a story I would feel empty since it was over. I would draw the characters, envisioning how they would look like and writing character synopsis. These were the innocent and carefree times, before middle school came around and I entered my shortly lived angsty rebellious phase. Of course this phase wasn’t too bad since I am forever the “goody-two shoes” as my classmates labelled me as since the third