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Reading has been a big deal in my family.  Not that I was forced to do it but rather it provides great pleasure to me to open up a good book and wander off into an unknown world.  And that feeling all comes from how much joy I saw it bring to the women of my family over the years.
My grandmother is a reader and before Kindle she would have a large collection of paperbacks in here house.  And whenever we would go to see her and my grandfather, my mom would always bring back books and magazines home from my grandma’s collection.  They bonded over reading the same book together and as I got older I wanted this same experience with my mom. 
However when I was younger and learning to read I found it to be very difficult.  See I have trouble sounding out words, which is especially hard when phonics are often the way to teach reading in school.  I know what certain letters sound like, I even know what certain groups of letters sound like but when paired all together in a word I’ve never seen before I come up empty. 
I hated reading in school I would sit there during reading time and beg God not to let the teacher call on me because who wants to show case what they do badly.  Not me.  My mom even had time set up for me after school to meet with a teacher to help me but I didn’t want to standout as someone with a learning disability, so often times I didn’t show. 
It was my greatest embarressment as a kid and I never really overcame it till I started theatre in high school. There was something about memorizing and learning to act on those words that really made me more confident in my reading.  And I could really see a change. I didn’t mind being called on in my literature class, in fact I enjoyed reading poetry and even Shakespeare because they could be more dramatically read.  One time after reading a poem in Mrs. Wilson’s class
another student told me that I had read that poem really well and they probably didn’t understand how much that has meant to me.
Since then I read constantly. I still struggle with reading every now and then but it hasn’t hindered the joy I get from reading.  It’s why two of my pages on this blog are devoted to books.