"What are you reading?” This is a question I recall being asked almost every day in the 3rd grade after-school daycare. Here I would sit at the end of the day, Monday through Friday, for an hour or two waiting for my parents to pick me up following a strenuous day of kickball at recess and painting butterflies in art class. Each day a new classmate would approach me, tapping me on the shoulder and ask what I was doing. I suppose I looked slightly out of place as I was the only eight year old not playing house with the other girls. When this question was asked I would pick my head up from my book and explain that I was reading the dictionary. The looks I received were incredulous, I was asked why I would ever want to do that, each time I replied " why wouldn’t you want to?” …show more content…
I would go through so many books in elementary school that my parents complained of not having space in the bookshelf. This is how I found myself reading the dictionary in the third grade, it was the only book left in my bookshelf that I had not read yet and my parents refused to take me to the bookstore until the end of the month. So, I picked up the dictionary and read. While I did not understand how to use many of the new words I learned (which I’m sure many people picked up on as I went around calling every tall person I saw "voluminous" because I was convinced it meant tall but in a cooler way), I enjoyed the challenge of learning. However, this is not the story of how much I love to read, it is about how I discovered my favorite subject. As I was reading this dictionary I came across a foreign word, "evolution". As I read the definition that stated "
We were also required to read a certain amount of books to test on and write stories of our own. This meant that we had to take our knowledge to the test and find books that would interest us. As we went to the library once every week I was very eager to read many different books. I would go home and read so that I could try and finish books as fast as I could. Since I had nothing else to do as a child I always read after finishing my homework. Reading was my favorite thing to do because it kept me from feeling lonely or bored. My parents would see that I was trying my best to read as much as I could, which made them proud of me. They knew that I was capable of becoming a good reader and
Ask yourself, how was your 8th grade year… Was it good, bad, fun, or stressful? Well most of my 8th grade year was bad but the ending actually turned out good. The start of my year was exciting, but that was just the beginning. As time went on and the work started to come in, that's when things turned south for me. I started stressing about everything I had to do, I was getting to overwhelmed. I would catch myself slipping constantly and it was worrying me because I didn't want to get held back a year. I slowly started to lose all interest in all of my work.
The first beloved books in my life were the Sesame Street Encyclopedia volumes. At three, I wasn't old enough to read them, but I always wanted to have them read to me. In fact, I memorized the ten volume set so when my parents would skip some pages I would ask them to read what they skipped. After learning to read on my own, my favorite book became the anatomy volume in the Charlie Brown Encyclopedia. Courtesy of a supermarket book offer, I was the only kindergartner who knew about fertilized egg cells. As I grew older, I continued to read largely because reading taught me so much outside of what we learned in school.
Instead of mom reading children’s books to me, I read them to her. And if I stumbled upon something I didn’t know or understand, mom helped me out! Soon enough I started reading to her without stuttering of not knowing how to say a word. I started being able to sound out words easier and my fluency became much better than before. First grade came around and I started reading bigger books such as Junie B. Jones and also the Magic Treehouse books. Books became easier to read as I aged and the books I read were getting bigger and bigger. In 5th and 6th grade I read The Red Pyramid, The Throne of Fire, and The Serpents Shadow, a trilogy called The Kane Chronicles written by Rick Riordan. I thought these three books were the greatest three books ever written! I even thought they were better than the hunger games! Especially with the series being based around Egyptian gods and theology, and also managed to tie in kids around my age that I could relate to. Those books made me love reading more than I ever have and I would read them again if I had the time to. Once 8th grade came out along I decided to read a “big boy” book: DaVinci Code by Dan Brown. I thought I was so cool because I was reading a book that my parents have read. It has been the best book I have yet to read so far because it sparked my interest from the first sentence, to the last, there was intense suspense throughout the whole book and I could nonstop
I would only read books that were required for class, and even then I usually would not finish them. Reading was never something that I liked. When I got into high school, I started reading books for fun a little more than before. I was always a Harry Potter fan but since I did not like to read I only watched the movies. I remember reading those books and actually liking them. My junior year was also a time in my reading history that I remember well. As a class we were reading the Great Gatsby in time to see the movie for the midnight premier. Each day we were instructed to read up to a certain page, no further. I did not like the book at first, just like any other book I was forced to read for school. But, one night I was reading and the book got so interesting for me I could not put it down. That was the first book in along time that I enjoyed reading that was assigned to me. After my junior year, I went right back to my old ways of not reading books. My senior year I took AP English, so this required a lot of books. Thinking back to that year of school I remember finishing maybe one or two of those books. Although, I didn’t read all of those books, I still got a good grade in the class. One thing I did learn from that class about not reading all the books was reading the summaries is not good enough because, they leave out all the
My dad taught me that books could be my teachers, my mom taught me that our backyard could be my classroom, and my sister showed me that you could bring books into the swimming pool. I did not know it when I would spend hours in the pool reading a book that my parents weren’t encouraging it in vain, but my family life, for good reason, was centered on books. We were the planets orbiting around one sun that was the bookshelf. Little did I know that books would be the catalyst to academic success in my early life, and I owe it all to my family. Although a life with a book in your nose might seem boring, I was never bored. Living through the characters vicariously, I explored Narnia with Lucy, attended Hogwarts with Harry, and rode dragons with Eragon. Of course
Many summer reading books are just uninteresting; so for me reading then became a chore that I was being forced to do. I already had a negative experience with being embarrassed while reading, so then to get one boring book after the other just solidified that reading was not enjoyable. Other than bad summer reading books I was just a very active child, I enjoyed running around and playing sports. I did not have the patience as a child to read, I always wanted to be on the go.
As a child, I have always been fond of reading books. My mother would read to me every single night before I went to bed and sometimes throughout the day. It was the most exciting time of the day when she would open the cabinet, with what seemed to be hundreds of feet tall, of endless books to choose from. When she read to me, I wanted nothing more than to read just like her. Together, we worked on reading every chance we had. Eventually I got better at reading alone and could not put a book down. Instead of playing outside with my brothers during the Summer, I would stay inside in complete silence and just read. I remember going to the library with my mom on Saturdays, and staying the entire day. I looked forward to it each and every week.
I went through most of school reading those boring books that we all know about, and it was a serious struggle for me. When reading something you’re forced to, you don't find it quite enjoying. If you don’t enjoy it, you can forget what you’ve read, not get much out of the book, find it incomprehensible, and so on. Then out of nowhere in my life, I had discovered the first book that I honestly enjoyed. I can’t remember a whole lot about them, but i do remember the feeling of finding the first book I liked. The book was almost life changing it seemed. I would read it many times over and over again! These books, Choose Your Own Adventure series, were full of action and took me places! You directed where the story went, or ended by making choices for the main character. It was different every time you read it! It not only was good for reading, but also helped with being able to comprehend what I was reading, finding the theme of a book, and a lot of reading skills. I was finally an active reader! My reading took off, my attention was captivated, and my reading skills began to really
Some may ask why is life hard. Life is an amazing thing and we shouldn’t take the greatness of it for granted. Today you are going to hear a story about a young teenagers life that has been hiding stuff for his family. This young boy in the story makes it through the struggle he is going through. This is something we all have to do keep our head up and keep going no matter what.
Oh seventh grade, what a year to remember. That was actually my favorite year of middle school. At home during this time was a mess and my grades also plummeted but I think going to school took some stress off because I was taking some time to "myself" and forgetting for a while about my home situation. Seventh grade, I would say was a year of friends for me. I had and still to this day have a friend from kindergarten that I considered a best friend. Until a new girl came along, lets call her Patricia. Patricia basically took "my spot" I guess in fifth grade while I was off at my new school for the year. Anyway speeding forward to seventh grade I noticed my best friend, lets call her Amanda, not really talking to me anymore and or passing by
Reading always became tiresome to me. We had a reading block in class everyday. The reading block was to make us read fifteen minutes straight a day. Ms. Peshca, my seventh grade teacher, ensured that the class would read. I never read the books until we started reading The Hunger Games.
When I finally learned how to read, I couldn't get enough of it, several hours were spent along my twin sister reading what the book offered and admiring its colorful pictures. Learning to read is a happy time to most children, for me the excitement was double, I, at last got to read my book, and get answers to some of my countless questions. The value of knowledge is priceless, my mother has always said to me, the more you know the more you value, which is true. Knowledge is power, knowing more gives you more access to what the world has to offer, and that is pretty much infinite.
Maybe, my sister and I inherited this live of reading from my father, or perhaps, our environment influenced us, but we were hooked onto books from a very early age. We would even take them to social gatherings, where we sure that we would get bored, and then just disappear into a quiet corner and spend the evening reading.
Reading and books became a real struggle for me from elementary all the way to high school because I found it hard to comprehend the books that I was made to read. These books were not interesting to me and I found myself starring at pages for hours at a time and would not know or understand what I read.