Blog Post #1 Childhood Reading Adventures

     As a child, I remembered reading various books about horses, Junie B. Jones, and the Magic Tree House series. Most of these books were centered around adventure although, I feel that the books that had the greatest effect on me were the ones mostly about horses. I had always dreamed of having/owning a horse one day and at the time was taking riding lessons in order to learn how to ride and take care of the most beautiful creatures God created.

    Even though I liked reading about these marvelous creatures, reading was not something that I necessarily enjoyed, but did in order to make good grades in school. In our school, we had a system called, “Accelerated Reader” where you were tested over a book you read and different books were worth a certain amount of points called, “AR points.” In order to make good grades in Language Arts/English class, you had to receive a certain amount of AR points within a six weeks period. At the time I personally felt like I was forced to read, so it was hard to sometimes find joy in it as I do now. However, with having these experiences I want my classroom to not have to feel that they are necessarily forced to read, but that they find something that is interesting to them and that they find joy in reading about it. I do not want reading to feel that it is punishment, but rather an award. In order to create this, I would like to challenge my students to dive deeper into their curiosities about subjects that they love and enjoy.


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