whence book-learning?

[jazzfish]

Inspired by a post by nineweaving sometime last week:

How did y'all learn to read? Did you teach yourselves, or learn in school, or what?

I don't know how I learned to read. My parents (mother?) must have read picture books to me. I know that one day when I was three or four, I picked up Go Dog Go in the store and said "I want this one!" My mother said "Are you going to read it yourself?" Her tone implied that if I said no I wasn't getting the book, so of course I said "Yes." And I took it home and laid down on the floor and read it, and didn't realise what I'd done until I was through.

From there the next things I can recall reading were the Mr Men / Little Miss books, and then a Hardy Boys book (The Mystery of the Chinese Junk) that my great-Aunt Celia sent me, and then some Greek and Norse myths out of a collection on the landing, and then Tolkien, over four or five years and three houses. There must have been other things I read on my own in there, but they didn't really make an impression. I distinctly recall the bookcase on the landing, and I *think* that means it was in the townhouse in Leavenworth (first grade) rather than the house in Fairfax (second thru fourth grades).

And after Tolkien came other brightly-spined Darrell-K-Sweet-covered Del Rey paperbacks, and Pop Shackelford's copy of Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, leading in a more or less direct line to the well-adjusted young man I am today.

Comments

[shanaqui]

I didn't learn to read properly until I was six or seven, despite my parents and the school's best efforts. The school were keen on teaching me to read phonetically, an approach that has never worked (I still can't work out how to pronounce a word by looking at it, even by assuming standard pronunciation rules). The books they used were uber simple, and they got simpler the more I seemed to struggle... but I complained to my mother that they "tasted" bad. I'm not sure why she didn't realise I had lexical->gustatory synaesthesia then, since she does too, but she didn't! She started using the whole word method with me, and actually interesting books, and regardless of how I was doing on my own reading, she'd read a book to me every night (following the words with a finger).

One evening, I just read the whole book to her... and the next, and the next, at which point she realised that at some point everything had finally assembled in my brain and I was reading. I read the rest of that series, ploughed through all the easy books school insisted on giving me, signed up at the library... Within maybe six months of learning to read, I read The Hobbit; within a year, I was reading my mother's books, digging into the adult shelves at the library, and fully capable of getting ten books out of the library and returning them the next day, completely read.

Related might be the fact that around that same age, people finally realised I was extremely short sighted, and I got glasses... On the other hand, my mother suspected I was simply bored by the books and refusing to read them. I don't remember well enough to say. I do remember reading Beatrix Potter one day before school while my mother was trying to plait my hair, and refusing to move until I finished the book; apart from that and a book about cats, I can't remember much else about my early reading!

[jazzfish]

Oh, neat! That kind of "click" is great. As is the "and then I tore through the library." :)