“Don’t forget after school you have a reading lesson,” my mom said to me every tuesday. Usually I would be fine with having private lessons but not twice a day. I had one in the morning everyday then on tuesdays in the morning and afternoon. In 4th grade, my teacher noticed that I was behind with my reading and put me into a special reading group. Then after months with very little progress I ended up having another reading lesson after school. This caused me to hate reading even more than I already had. My teachers were mean and always forced me to read books that never interested me. When I would read books that I picked, I would actually read and had signs of improvement. Once fourth grade ended so did all of the extra reading help. In fifth …show more content…
I constantly had a book in my hands and was always in the library looking for a new book to take a journey with. A memory that will always be stuck in my brain is in seventh grade I read over ten books in a month. I believe my excitement towards reading came from my reading teachers because they were actually nice and let us pick the books we wanted to read. In one year I went from the reading level ‘P’ to level ‘R’ on the verge of level ‘T’. Reading was now one of my favorite hobbies. I remember how in fifth grade my teacher won’t let me read the Twilight series, but once I hit middle school they were encouraging me to read it. I was encouraged to read more books that I wanted to that I was discouraged from in elementary …show more content…
It was hard to find time to read while doing homework, work, play sports, and have a social life. In english I was “forced” to read To Kill A Mockingbird, and by forced I mean I got told to read it at that certain time. I had already planned to read it because I had heard it was a classic and I had interest in it. Even though I still don’t have time to read I still like to read. I mainly read in the summer since I have more free time and I enjoy reading outside in the sun. It’s hard not having free time to read during the school year because I keep buying books that I want to read but haven’t had the chance to get to them yet, so I have a huge stack of books sitting in my room unread. My goal for the summer is to read them all and then buy more if possible. An accomplishment I made though was I read the Divergent series in three days. A little background to this is each book has over five hundred pages and there are three books in total. Then following that I read all of John Green’s
My parents have always stressed the importance of reading. Throughout my whole life, they have motivated me to read and they have encouraged me to find books that I find interesting to read. Because of their encouragement, I am an avid reader today. When I was a child, just starting to enjoy reading I liked to read books that were fiction. Some of my favorite books to read as a child are series that I still love today and I think I still have every book in each series stored in my attic. They are The Boxcar Children, Junie B. Jones, and The Magic Tree House.
In the essay titled “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading” written by John Holt and published in Reading for writers in 2013, Mr. Holt discusses why most children aren’t interested in reading. Mr. Holt spent fourteen years as an elementary school teacher. He believed classroom activities destroy a student’s learning ability. Mr. Holt never let his students say what they thought about a book. He wanted his students to look up every word they didn’t know. People can learn difficult words without looking them up in the dictionary.
My reading experience in junior-high and first three years of high school were not so much different. I had never been enthusiastic to read about predetermined topics assigned by my teacher and they continued to assign predetermined reading topics that made me feel frustrated and at times uncomfortable. But there was positivity that came out of these repulsive and devastating books, such as Lord of The Flies by William Golding or The Night by Elie Wiesel. Lord of the Flies caused me to confirm that humans must have rules and a government to help
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
All throughout my younger preschool and kindergarten years i didn’t read. I didn’t really like reading at the time. This is because i never found books that interested me or that i liked, there were only a few ever. It also didn’t help that i was far sighted and needed glasses to read. They said i would have them for the rest of my life. Now that i could see and read better i was better at it but still didn’t like it. There was nothing that caught my attention or sounded interesting. For a while i got into books about jets and planes in the military or any vehicle really. I read those for a while but i still didn’t feel that these were the books for me.
Reading was never something I fussed about growing up. As a child, I loved genres of realistic fiction. I was hooked on The New Adventures of Mary Kate and Ashley, Goosebumps, The Amazing Days of Abby Hayes, Judy Moody, and especially, Zoobooks and Highlights magazines. My mother was always ready to help build my reading and writing skills. She took me to the library constantly to feed my passion for books and knowledge. I loved exploring the shelfs, organizing the books, and filling up my library cart. I tried keeping a diary in elementary school to keep track of my outings with my parents and grandparents to museums, zoos, movies, and libraries. This flash of writing enthusiasm was spun from books I read in the 4th and 5th grade that were
There are many different types of events that shape who we are as writers and how we view literacy. Reading and writing is viewed as a chore among a number of people because of bad experiences they had when they were first starting to read and write. In my experience reading and writing has always been something to rejoice, not renounce, and that is because I have had positive memories about them.
My teacher, Ms. Peshca, came to a conclusion to that she didn’t know what to do or how to explain to me what’s the importance of reading. Ms. Peshca would send me to another reading teacher, and she would try to explain things better than her. Ms. Bell would sit me down and go through different books with me. I wasn’t interested in books that were my age appropriate. I started reading books that were not friendly with age group.
I can remember being in 3rd grade, and also 4th grade, I had this teacher, she was a genuine teacher, and every day we would have free reading time, and were allowed to read whatever we wanted and bring a snack of choice. I saw kids reading ginormous books to narrow books, kids were reading horror books, funny books, mystery, and etc. She gave the feeling that I could read any book that I wanted to read, that I wasn’t compelled to read a chapter book, or read books everybody was reading, and I chose to read “Goosebumps”, and “Captain Underpants” every day at school. I liked this teacher, considering she allowed us to read what we wanted to read, and not read what another student else was reading, or chose a book for us. I have began to