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Pre-K
This is the time I was being read Dr.Seuss- Horton Hatches The Egg, and since we read it so many times and it is a pattern writing, I was able to memorize it. -
Learning to spell on my own!
In kindergarten, I was able to start spelling new words by myself. I remember when I was able to spell "was" by sounding it out, which may seem small but I was proud of myself ! -
Second Grade
I was moved across the country in the middle of my second grade year, so the curriculum being completely different was hard and I felt like reading was unimportant. I did not try to learn new vocabulary, and during silent reading time, only pretended to read. -
Third grade
I started the third grade with a second grade reading level, like a 2.4 or something like that. My third grade teacher was tough, but she got me to love reading. I read so many books that year, I got up to a 5th grade level by the end of the year. I was even helping other students learn to read harder words. -
Growing up into new genres
I switched from things like The Magic Treehouse, to things like Dork Diaries, and started liking more realistic books rather than fantasy. This also was a step up in vocabulary and was able to help me learn new words within the genres as well. -
Fluency Reading
I hated this so much. I have always been a slow reader, not because fluency was hard it just takes me a second to fully process what I am reading and get the full image into my head. So when it was my turn to read whatever passage with the teacher, I would speed through it and mess up words I would never mess up, because I was afraid of messing up by being too slow. I still am a slower reader today. -
Great American Challenge
This was held in school to learn things such as the preamble or the national anthem and to understand punctuation in these things. As well as memorize presidents, states, gettysburg address and so on. I had to write out the pledge of allegiance, and the preamble, I had to memorize everything else. But the writing out helped me understand punctuation and introduced me to grammar from a few hundred years ago. -
Silent Reading
In middle school, we had 10 minutes after the announcements every morning to silent read. This was school wide. This helped me learn to love books, and throughout the year helped me and my reading levels go up. -
No electronics
In middle school once I finally got a phone, I had to put any and all electronics in the kitchen an hour before I went to bed. This helped because once it was bedtime and I wasn't ready to sleep, I would just read and read my novels and I swear I was reading like 2 full novels a week. I was able to boost my literacy and my speed of reading. -
College
Even now, I am learning new things about grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure and all things under that umbrella. I am able to really continue my reading journey in college with the amount of research I have been doing. It helps me understand things like rhetoric, and scientific research and so much more