HOW I LEARNED TO READ
Middle
School Entry Winner
Ashley
Kessler
Kindergarten was supposed to me one of the most exciting years of school
but to me, it didn’t seem like it would ever be that way. I had just moved to
a new home in a new school district with no friends.
What made it significantly worse was that I had a mean, old teacher.
She was nasty and should have been a sixth grade teacher but needed to
fill in. As class progressed, we
were starting to learn our first steps of reading. I didn’t like reading with
the class and the malicious teacher.
One day, I came home from school and sitting on my dresser was an
appealing book. It was filled with
all sorts of pictures and words that I had not yet understood.
That night, my mom tucked me in and opened my brand new book.
She didn’t read the book, she sang it to me so that I would learn all
the words and phrases. I sang the
songs in school, at lunch, in gym and going home in the car.
The day after, another huge book was sitting on my dresser. It
was filled with rhymes and stories such as Humpty Dumpty, Mary Had a Little Lamb
and my favorite, The Wheels on the Bus. With
all three hundred pages, my mom read about three or four to me each night,
learning more words than ever. Then,
just about any time I went to school, I had a new song and could read a little
better each day. A couple of kids
liked my songs and wanted to learn them so I brought my book into school.
Pretty soon, the whole class, including the teacher, knew most of my
songs. I made more friends each day. To
this day, I still have the book, and when my sister was in kindergarten, I sang
those songs to her. Ever since
kindergarten, I loved reading and singing.