#31 – Dangle

I still remember when that switch flipped in my brain and I suddenly understood how to read. I’m not saying I went from nothing to reading Shakespeare but I went from seeing letters to understanding the concept of stringing the sounds together as words. I was sitting on the floor in my room and got some books out of the closet. I believe the first page I read was “Spot. See Spot run. Run Spot run!”

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9 thoughts on “#31 – Dangle”

  1. MadJon says:

    I still remember drawing some squiggly lines on a page, and asking my Dad if that was how joined-up handwriting worked! 😀

  2. J-L says:

    Funny, I was just recently thinking about when that switch flipped for me.

    I was in the first grade, and we had learned the letters in school (their sounds and how to write them in cursive), and the teacher told us to write down the sound “SA” (my family was living in Italy at the time). I had no idea what she was talking about, so I furtively peeked at my benchmate’s workbook to see what he wrote.

    I saw that he wrote “sa” (in cursive) and immediately the light went off. Ah! You just string the letters together! And since Italian is written phonetically, reading and writing it was considerably easier for me than learning to read and write English (despite English being my first spoken language). Boy, how frustrating written English could be…

  3. kingklash says:

    I learned how to read when I was three. I really wanted to know what Spider-Man was saying on Electric Company. So I just kinda picked it up quick. Thank you, children’s Television Workshop!

  4. Notebooked says:

    I had a similar experience. I was reading some sort of book about a circus, and all of a sudden I recognized the letters and realized they formed words that I knew. It was just some sort of light going on in my head.

  5. Chuck says:

    I don’t remember learning how to read. I know I was four, but the process was pretty quick for me, so I don’t have any stand-out memories.

  6. Sean says:

    I don’t remember that particular switch flipping, but I do remember when I first understood how to read without pictures ilolustrating the work. I asked my mom how she could read without pictures (she was reading Galaxy magazine at the time) and she explained that you make the pictures in your head.

    Hmm. I’ve been noticing how visual I am, retaining written material much more easily than spoken, I never connected that the implications of that early memory. Interesting.

  7. Freezie43110 says:

    I taught myself to read while in Kindergarten. While everyone else was taking naptime, I was in a corner going over a Mickey Mouse short story.

  8. spidercow says:

    I learned to read at a really young age, like 2 or 3. I actually learned really fast, and my mom kept having to buy more books to read because all of my old ones were too easy. I still remember my mom asking if i wanted to read some baby book (forget which one), and i just gave her my best, “are you kidding me?” look. by the time i was in kindergarten, i was so good at reading that the teacher would just let me go off and do whatever while she was teaching all the other kids (most of which didn’t even know the first few letters of the alphabet).
    I’m 13 now, and everybody but me is still an idiot. I am now the schools’ official grammar Nazi, (though chances are I’ve made a few errors in this paragraph just because its 11:50 PM, I’m tired, and i don’t really care at the moment) and everyone hates hates me because of it. it just pisses me off when people spell simple words wrong.

  9. Ivan says:

    I recall pretty vividly getting the crap wooden-spooned out of me for writing in the book AFTER “See Spot Run..” – “Run Spot, Run! Never Poop Here Again!”

    I was just slightly ahead of my class in reading.

    The next week was writing 50 times “I will not swear on school grounds.”

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