Alphabet Reading

My love for reading runs deep. As a child in elementary school, I remember speedily zipping through each color coded level of SRA. I knew the school and town library inside and out. I would walk to town after school lugging home stacks of thick books (sometimes 10 at a time) and hide in my room and read and read and read. If I wasn’t helping with chores, I would read until someone pretty much dragged me away from my books. I knew the junior section of the library intimately. I actually gave myself a goal in 5^th or 6^th grade to read every book in the junior section of the library. Yes, that was my goal. I apparently didn’t like to strive for big things…I start small…just the junior section, nothing more.

But the up side of that project was that the A’s gave me Louisa May Alcott and a host of beautiful stories: Little Women, Little Men, Jo’s Boys, An Old Fashioned Girl, Eight Cousins, Under the Lilacs, etc. What young girl wouldn’t benefit from growing up under the influence of Alcott’s independent strong women? I met the Bronte sisters in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. I delved into the Civil Rights Movement with Sounder by William Armstrong. And I got lost in The Secret Garden with Frances Hodgsen Burnett.

 

I read a lot (probably not "all") of the A’s, B’s and slightly into the C’s before giving in (it was a small library). I came to the conclusion that 23 remaining alphabet letters may be a daunting task even for this 11 year old voracious reader.

Off-alphabet, I read: the Beany Malone series, the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series, Konigsburg’s Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley and Me, Elizabeth, the Little House on the Prairie Series and a wall full of biographies including Abraham Lincoln, Betsy Ross, Harriett Tubman, Helen Keller, and many more.

That was my start. I try to instill a love of reading in my two boys’ lives, too. We read books right from the get-go. I always allowed them to stay up as late as they wanted even when they were little as long as they were in bed and either reading or drawing. They did both…but rarely kept their eyes open long. My youngest loves to read and knows the local library well. My oldest reads as needed.

Every Christmas I buy them a book based on something that interests them at the time. I write a little note in it and date it. They read those books and keep them in their rooms. One of my fondest reading memories with my boys was when we drove to Florida and listened to Where the Red Fern Grows on tape. To this day, they speak fondly of that trip and that story. While I doubt they will read books A through Z, I’m sure they will still enjoy their own off-alphabet road trip.