My Early Reading Experiences

I remember books as always being a part of my childhood from Kindergarten onward. My mother loves to tell the grandchildren that I “flunked” coloring in Kindergarten. Evidently, I told the teacher I didn’t have time to color inside the lines. I don’t remember this interaction, but it’s believable because I thought coloring was a waste of time. I did it to get back to the other more important things to me—reading and math.

I had not attended pre-school or daycare, so school was this great place of discovery with reading being the best part. Books became a part of all my birthday and Christmas gifts. I always had a book with me and felt fine going off by myself to read. While sorting through the many boxes of papers saved by my mother over the years, I found several of my grade school report cards that showed Bs for grades and satisfactory progress in reading. I was surprised to see that my school grades in reading did not match the voracious way I consumed books independently. 

This made me think about reading instruction in my early years. I remember the boring readers with Spot, Dick, and Jane running everywhere and also the reading textbooks popular in my parochial school education, most likely the Faith and Freedom series popular for Catholic schools. What I remember most about those textbooks in hindsight is the traditional family—father, mother, children—all following traditional roles. They are white, have a house with a fence, and pray daily. It was a 50s/60s middle-class ideal perpetuated by the sitcoms of that era like Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, Leave It to Beaver, etc.

Thomas C. Foster, in Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America, praises Dr. Seuss as marking the shift away from “See Spot run” as he references John Hershey’s Life article “Why Do Students Bog Down on First R? A Local Committee Sheds Light on a National Problem: Reading,” from May 1954, which claimed that early reading textbooks were “‘Insipid. . . . Full of children no real child could identify with–too clean, too polite, too satic” (262-63). This resonated with me as I read it recently. Added to the early readers, we later moved on to the SRA Reading Series. I remember the cards we drew to complete our reading assignments and progress through our reading levels.  None of this instruction was especially interesting to me, but the local public library bookmobile that visited every two weeks and the monthly Scholastic order form kept me awash in reading that did interest me.

I can say that learning to read was a revelation and created a lifelong love affair with words, characters, and stories. However, the typical instructional materials of the day did not inspire me to be the reader I am today. I complied with the reading instruction presented to me and then returned to my choice reading, which explains the Bs in a subject where I excelled and read at an adult level by middle school. My takeaway from my own early experiences is that instructional strategies like phonics and quality reading materials that interest and reflect the lives of children are key to developing reading skills and joy and avoiding compliance and disinterest.

But what about today’s students learning to read? Join me for my next post on reading instruction today.