Learning to Love Reading

My favorite memory about reading is the Book Fairy.  For as long as I can remember, she came every Sunday night before we went to bed and left a book under one of our pillows.  After our baths, we would all race to our rooms to look under our pillows and see who got the book.  We would all climb in bed together and Mom would read the book to us.  This was the highlight of our week!  The Book Fairy did other things too.  She would always leave books for us for our birthdays, and at Christmas time, she would wrap a Christmas book every day in the month of December and put it under the Christmas tree for us to read before we went to bed.  Books were such a big part of my life, and all of these things really made reading such a happy activity for me.  I could hardly wait to learn to read on my own.

            I have always loved reading. I have been reading all of my life, and it is one of the best times of the day for me.  Even now, I read every night before I go to bed no matter how late I stay up doing homework and studying. It helps me unwind so that I can begin a fresh, new day the next day.   It is a great way to escape into a completely different world for a short time and to learn about other people. Reading has always been a part of my daily routine and special occasions in my family, and I believe that is why I love to read so much.

From the day I was born, my mom read to me every day.  Every day before our nap and every night before we went to sleep, my mom would rock Richard and me while she read to us.  We would always start with a fun book, and then the books would get calmer and calmer until it was time for us to go to sleep.  The last book we read every night was called Sleepytime Rhyme, and it was about mamas and babies going to sleep.  Books like Miss Spider’s Tea Party and Green Eggs and Ham helped me learn to count, my ABCs, and how to try new things. Books helped me get ready for my first day of school when I was 3.  My mom read The Kissing Hand to me the night before my first day, and it helped me understand that even though I wouldn’t be with my mom at school, we would still be in each other’s hearts, and she would be waiting for me when my day is over.  We still read that book the night before the first day of school every year!  I always get a special book for the first day of school and for the last day of school with a note written in it.

            My kindergarten teacher at St. James was Mrs. Spielman. She had a special little tree house in her classroom that her students could sit in to read.  It was my favorite place in the classroom, and I was in the tree house as much as I could be.  One day, she called my mom to see if I could be in an advanced reading group that would go with a special reading teacher every day.  I was so excited about it, until I realized that Richard wasn’t going to be in the group. Richie and I do everything together, so it was really weird not doing something with him.  The next day when it was time for reading, I went with about 4 other people to Mrs. Weinstein, the reading specialist.  I remember the first time that I went into the classroom. I didn’t really know what to expect, so I was a little nervous. I specifically remember that the chair was cold. Mrs. Weinstein talked for a minute like all teachers do on the first day you do something, and then she handed us a book and we started reading.  It was a book about a dog, and it was really good.  I was finally learning to read real books all by myself!  We quickly moved to small chapter books, and then to larger ones.  We would practice reading, but we would also do lessons that had to do with the plot of the book.   That ended up being my favorite part of the day all the way through second grade. Then the bell would ring and it would be time to go back to our regular class.  That was the only part of the class that I didn’t like.  When I’m in the middle of a good book, I don’t like to have to stop, and we usually had to stop right at a cliffhanger!   We read so many good books that other people in my grade didn’t get to read.  One reason I think this class was so important to me was that Mrs. Weinstein taught me lots of things about reading, like how to use context clues to figure out what something means if I don’t understand it, how to use descriptions to form pictures in my mind, and how to find clues in the book to show me when and where something is happening.  But the most important thing she taught me was how to enjoy what I was reading without just deciphering the words.  That allowed me to get so into books that I felt like I was a part of the story.

I often wonder why many of my friends don’t like to read as much as I do.  When I think back on all of the happy memories I have about books and reading, I know that I was really lucky to be exposed to books in that way.