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Earliest Memories and Texts: Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss
My earliest memories of reading involve my mother reading me Dr. Seuss' books like Green Eggs and Ham. The off-kilter illustrations and frequent use of rhyme stirred my imagination and made reading fun for the first time. I believe this was the origin of my love for fantastical/imaginative storytelling. -
Reading in an Academic Setting: Reader's Choice and The Berenstain Bears
My first memories of reading in school were in kindergarten. Our teacher, Ms. Tan, would allow us 20-30 minutes to read a book of our choosing from the class bookshelf. I frequently went for any book in the Berenstain Bears series. I believe this is where I developed a love for reading serialized books. -
Accelerated Reading Program and Reading Comprehension
Somewhere around the 3rd or 4th grade, I remember becoming aware of a program called the Accelerated Reading Program which was designed to incentivize students' independent reading and monitor their comprehension and growth. Pizza Hut was affiliated with the program at the time and students would receive points that could add up to free pizzas in time. I didn't like pizza, so it did not appeal to me and I was not incentivized by the program. It did make me aware of the term "comprehension." -
Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone: My First Love
My mother bought me the first book in the Harry Potter Series in the 7th grade. Until then, I just read what I was forced to by my school teachers. I had never considered reading as a leisure activity and did not truly love it. Harry Potter was my first glimpse at what my mind could create from words written on a page if given engaging and fantastical texts. I could not put the book down and immediately asked my mom to buy me the next in the series... and the next and the next after that. -
High School Analysis and Annotation: The Hound of the Baskervilles
I fell out of love with reading in High School. In my Sophomore year, my English teacher assigned us The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and would quiz us daily on the chapters she assigned for comprehension. We were meant to annotate the text too. We rarely discussed the text with classmates or answered questions that required critical thinking. It was simply boring and unchallenging, but it definitely influenced how I develop questions about texts and make tasks engaging. -
English 101: Into the Wild and Informational Texts
Sadly, I had not developed a passion for reading informational texts until my first year English class in college. My professor challenged our ideas and forced us to support them with text evidence as we read Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, a story about a young man not too dissimilar from myself at the time. After reading, we wrote thesis papers that represented a significant percentage of our grade for the course. We needed to incorporate evidence from multiple texts as we formed our own ideas. -
Magazines and Vocabulary Development
At some point in college, I began reading magazine articles that interested me in my free time. I realized that these article writers often used very unique and sometimes obscure vocabulary. It was here that I realized I needed to grow my own. I went on a journey of looking up every word I was unfamiliar with and committed to this practice without fail. I began internalizing these words and with the advent of smartphones, it was easier than ever to search up dictionary definitions. -
Reading for Lifelong Learning and Self Improvement
Shortly after graduating from college, I realized for the first time that I could not just rest on my laurels and stop expanding my worldviews, so I visited my local libraries and bought a Kindle device for self-guided learning. It was around this time that I read many self help, popular science and psychology texts like The Brain that Changes Itself and Quiet. These books had lasting impacts on the way I view myself and the world around me. -
Teacher Preparation and Teaching
In 2020, I began my teacher preparation program and began to reflect in a metacognitive way on the practices and mindsets of effective readers. During teacher preparation, I learned that my passion for reading and being an effective literacy/ELA teacher were not inherently correlated. I had a lot to learn about being an effective teacher, and I did. I read a lot about what students need from a good reading teacher. -
Reading Instruction and Think Alouds
In 2022, I was in my second year of teaching ELA. My approach to reading was more structured, and my approach to reading for pleasure followed suit. I began reading with my students in mind and would find myself trying to identify text details in a more purposeful way to connect larger literacy concepts and skills. I also found that while instructing, I would read in a way that forced me to think out loud about effective reading strategies and how I analyze it in a deeper way.