This is just a fun little story and I wanted to share it with the class--one of the themes for my auto-ethnography is sponsorship. I'm focusing mainly on my mom, so I emailed her and asked her to think of any stories about my youth that would be useful for my paper. She wrote back two stories:
1. This is a true story I wish I could do a study about it. When I was pregnant with you I had a 1st grade class that absolutely loved reading. They read anything in sight and I read to them every day before they went home, hence I was already reading to you. Now the classes that I had with Ryan and Eric (my older brothers) liked other things and I see how they are affected by that too. So you tell me does it make a difference that I was reading to you before you were born? I think so. -- It is true, I've loved to read since I was little. It's funny because, for the most part, my brothers absolutely hate reading, so I was the family exception. But even when I was in 1st grade I was reading chapter books before most of my peers. I found it interesting that my mom thinks this is because she read to me before I was born.
2. This one I still tell to my class and they laugh about it. The famous PHONE BOOK STORY. You were probably 6 months old when you pulled the huge phone book out of the cupboard and sat down on the floor and started to flip page after page. Of course your mouth was moving 60 miles an hour with baby babble but it was the beginning of reading. -- My mom's told me this story a thousand times and for some reason I still find it hilarious. Mostly because at that age the phone book probably weighed more than I did, so whenever I picture it I picture myself getting squished by a huge phone book. But it also makes me laugh because I can vaguely remember doing this multiple times throughout my youth, just because I wanted to "read".
I just thought these two stories were interesting and a little funny, so I figured I'd share. Does anyone else have a stories from their parents about childhood literacy?
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3 comments:
My mom loves to tell a story about how I got up on the table when I was a toddler. I put a stool next to the chair and a couple of books on top of the chair so I could hoist myself up to the table. Apparently, the reason I did this was to play with the salt and pepper shakers. This isn't the reading and writing literacy that we usually think about, but it does show that I had some decent problem solving literacies at a young age (not to brag or anything). Now if only gathering the right research to reach my goal were as easy as gathering a stool and books to reach a couple of salt and pepper shakers.
When I was a child my parents would read to me nightly, and they said that at least once a day I would pull out all my books and magazines, spread them out over the floor and just look at them. I would also make everyone who came over read to me.
My mother doesn't have any particular stories about my literacy, but once the Harry Potter novels came out, when I was around 10 I believe, my youngest brother (2yrs older than me) and I used to see who could read the books the fastest. We used to argue about it all the time. How many days it took, how many hours we spent reading, what activities got in the way of our reading. This is something that is still in play today (though not so much the speed reading thing). Whenever one of my brothers reads a book, I want to read it, just so that I have the same knowledge they have.
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