Reading in School

My earliest memories of reading in school are listening to a story read by our teacher and community volunteers or parents, keeping reading logs of class stories we had written, and going to the library to listen to interesting tales and watching the librarian perform puppet shows for us. I loved reading as a child and was even part of an after school program in the later grades of elementary school called Reading Robins. It was just a few students from my grade and we would meet with our sponsor (another teacher) and pick new chapter books to read and then discuss them as a group. It made reading fun and social, which it had not really been before, at least with friends.

My earliest memories of reading outside of school are reading with my Mom and Dad all the time! This is probably why I loved reading so much and was not as intimidated by it as other students were. We read after school, before bedtime and on the weekends. My younger sister had one particular book that she wanted to read everyday, but I wanted to read a new one each time. I had favorite authors that my parents would take me to meet and get them to sign my books and when I was younger I spotted environmental print and recognized them as words. My family also participated in a book drive, where I had to keep a log of all the books either my parents read to me or I read myself and after a certain number of hours Scholastic would donate books to our school library!