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My first exposure to reading was sitting down with my mom and/or my grandma and listening to them read me stories -
An early memory I have of reading is sitting down on the carpet reading with my kindergarten teacher, who loves to animate stories, and taught us how to predict what will happen next along with endings. -
Once I was able to read and find books I liked, my mom took me and sister to the library all the time so we can further our reading ability. This is where I grew a love for reading books! -
In the 3rd grade, I was invited to a VIP reader club's party. I was among a few students who read the most books during the school year, and was rewarded with pizza, and a goodie bag. -
Another core memory for reading for me was reading to my little brother, when my mom was at work. This bonded us and grew his interest in learning how to read even though he has a learning disability -
Over the summer of 9th grade, I rewrote a story I had written in 8th grade, and published it to a website called Episode. The story ended up getting a million reads, and started my passion for creating stories to read and others to read/enjoy. This helped me learned to love reading from a different angle. -
In 9th grade, I had to read And Then There Were None. It was the summer reading assignment, which I completed, but when it came time to do analyses I always got C's and D's on the assignments. This made me dislike reading, and lose my passion for it. I was discouraged and thought reading was dumb after all these years, since other people who didn't read the book was passing while I was failing. -
Going into my sophomore year, I still didn't like reading. Until my english teacher that year assigned us 5-6 books. We got to pick one, and then was placed in a bookclub. You got to read the story you wanted, and I chose Sad Perfect, which was about a girl with an eating disorder, that isn't very common. I connected personally to this story, and made a friend within my book club. This restart my drive to read as much as I can -
In my junior year, my student council class decided to clean library books as a easy way to get community service hours, without having to stand out in the Vegas sun. While cleaning, I was sad by how dirty some of the covers were. Knowing kids don't have access to these stories because they are hidden away so staff can clean them, was disheartened. It made me happy to clean and provide new stories for others to enjoy and learn to love to read like me. -
I was a preschool teacher for about a year before returning to school in person. I worked at a preschool and had my own classroom of 2,3,4 years old. They were such a fun group, and an activity I did was read to each age group and provide them with skills like knowing colors (2 years old), knowing emotions (3 years old), and predict 4 and up children. This was so amazing and was a full circle for me which connected me back to my childhood of getting read to by my mom and grandmother