Reading In My Life

I do not remember being read to as a young child. (We moved a lot until I was six and books would not have been easy to move around with us.)However, the first book I remember is the best book - The Holy Bible. We went to church regularly and I knew the Bible was the book our religion was based on so I knew it was a very important book! Momma told me stories that were in it, since I was not reading yet.

Finally, in 1960, we moved to a small southeast Texas town and settled in there permanently. It didn't have any places of culture like art galeries, museams, music halls or theaters" until 1963 when Mrs. Bessie Tisinger had a vision of having an established library for the people of the community! She started it in her home and it was named the Tisinger Memorial Library. My Momma, although I don't remember her having any of her own, actually valued books highly. She wanted her children to be good readers, so, she would take us to the library often.The home was beautiful to me. It was white with a porch all along the front and there were two doors, one to take you into the Tisinger Home and the other went into the Tisinger Library. Mrs Tisinger also taught piano and my sister became one of her students. I'd stay in the library room looking at the books while she had her lesson. I don't remember ever checking out any books, but thought it was a pleasure to read there. 

At home, in addition to the Bible, we took out a subscription to the Sunday Houston Record Chronicle! After church on Sunday, Daddy would read nearly all the articles in that Sunday Houston Record Chronicle and I'd ask for the comics section from him. On Sundays, they were in color! They were not really funny to me, but they were kind of like chapters of a fiction book, so I needed to see the latest each Sunday.

As a first grader, I loved our reading books at school! They were of the what is now called Dick-and-Jane genre. These texts were actually based on research studies:

• William S. Gray drew on two lines of research in his work with Scott Foresman that resulted in the 1930 edition of the Elston Readers where Dick, Jane and their menagerie first appeared. The first line was Thorndike’s (1921) analyses of the frequency with which words occurred in written English. If a small number of words accounted for the majority of words in texts, Gray reasoned, learning to read should start with these word
• The second line of research was from Arthur Gates (1930) who made what he called “guesses” based on observational studies of how many repetitions children of different ability levels needed to learn a word (high-frequency words such as the, of, and, to, a). Average-ability children, Gates guessed, needed approximately 35 repetitions to learn a word. Gray guided Scott Foresman editors in engineering the Dick-and-Jane stories to have high-frequency words appear the requisite number of times.
• (http://textproject.org/library/frankly-freddy/whatever-happened-to-dick-and-jane)

Dick and Jane and their and their friends family's lived in pretty houses and there were clean fresh sidewalks for people to stroll on in the evening and for kids to play games like hopscotch, jump rope, ride tricycles and then training wheel bikes, marbles and jacks.  It was a safe environment in which neighbors kept their eye out on their neighbor's kids as they sat out on their beautiful front porches and watched the children play and waved to the people strolling by. When I read those books I went into what was called "daydreaming" about living in such a neighborhood and wondered if there really was such places.  I didn't see anything like that in our town.  I knew we couldn't live in such a place because my Daddy had his own business in behind and out front of our house. I didn't feel unfortunate about it, though. That was just the way it was. 

In about second grade, I loved reading the Bobbsey Twin books.  They were chapter books and whoever read them were "big kids"!

As a teen I became more interested in listening to music than reading.  We had no books at our house, just the newspaper (I no longer even cared to read the funnies) and sometimes Readers Digest, which didn't interest me either.  In my young teen years,  Momma  got her GED and become a wonderful, busy GED teacher.  We hardly ever went to the library.  She had GED books in stacks around the house, which appealed to adults, for every subject, but they didn't interest me. I read my Bible and Sunday School books sometimes.  

So, it's interesting that the library became such an important part of my life. 
Now, talk about an avid reader = that was my oldest daughter, who is now a doctor at the VA in NM! 
The reading I like to do now is responsive reading.  What do you think about what I've written.  I really want to read your imput!