In Kindergarten, I remember learning the letters of the alphabet and practicing the sounds letters and combinations of letters make (phonics). Then I remember reading.
One thing I cannot recall is the exact moment I started reading. That moment when everything just clicked. Since reading became such an integral part of my life and led me towards writing, shouldn’t that memory be ingrained in there somewhere? But alas, I have no recollection of the exact moment. What a bummer. I have plenty of other random memories cluttering up my brain.
The first book I remember reading at school was Pug. I sat with a group of students and a teacher or maybe a teacher’s aid and we took turns reading parts of the book. Recess followed shortly after and that made everyone happy.
As a kid, I read whatever looked interesting or was available. If lucky I’d find something that was interesting and available. I wasn’t very picky in those days. Phone books and catalogs sufficed if nothing else was handy. I even remember reading books such as The Runaway Pancake and The Gingerbread Man, which if I remember correctly were basically the same story! My favorite childhood story of all time has to be The Little Engine That Could by Watty Piper.
I didn’t become a voracious reader until much later. Our school library wasn’t huge, but I always found something interesting to read. At various times I focused on a particular topic. One year dinosaurs captured my imagination, another year airplanes. At one point there was a series on World War II Frogmen caught my attention. Once I honed in on a subject, I devoured everything I found on it. Come to think of it, I’m still like that today, especially with podcasts.
In second grade, my teacher held a classroom-wide reading contest. On the back wall, she posted a display of the solar system, starting with the sun and ending with Pluto. Each student had a rocket ship with their name on it. For every book you read, you made progress on the display of the Solar system. The longer the book, the more progress you made. If you made it to Pluto, your ship turned around and headed back the other way. There were two students who were very competitive and read two to three times as many books as I did, and their spaceships zoomed across the solar system at an incredible rate. I didn’t win, but I was proud of what I accomplished. I read more books for that contest than I had previously.
During these years I enjoyed finding books that engaged my imagination. When Star Wars came out in 1977 (more on that another time), my reading took a turn towards science fiction, although I still read anything that looked interesting; The Hardy Boys, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis, to name a few. Sometimes teachers read them aloud in class, and later I would get the book and read it on my own.
There was a sci-fi series called The Tripods by John Christopher which had a comic adaption in Boys Life magazine. I only read this in the waiting room at the orthodontist. The orthodontist’s office did not always have the most recent issue or another kid might have the one I needed to read. I grew frustrated, so I tracked down the individual books either at school or the public library so I could get the entire story.
I read many other books, some of which I’ll touch on in future posts. But these were my reading years, K-6, when we get to 7th grade, that’s when things really take off.