Falling in Love
Plopper, Kelly

KELLY: Well I first started when I got introduced to the literature of the world when I was very, very young and it started as an intangible thing. I watched programs when I was younger, I watched Reading Rainbow and the big comfy couch had a segment that was story telling. That sort of sparked my interest in all of this. Whenever I started Montessori in my preschool we had those little sheets of paper that had the lines on them that you need to make the uppercase letter go all the way up to the top and the lower case letter reached the middle dotted line. I loved doing those, I took those home and would practice writing and my letters and everything. My dad's a teacher so I was exposed to text shortly after that. One of my favorite books that was read to me and that I started reading when I was younger was "Goodnight Moon" which I'm sure lots of people are familiar with. It escalated from there and in elementary school, this started when I was in kindergarten, we had a program called Book it and a reading list was released for each grade and however many books you had when you reached a certain level you got rewarded; I thinking was Pizza Inn or Pizza Hut that was working with this and you could go in there and get a free little pan pizza and so they had that little reward there but really I just wanted to be able to say that I could read the whole reading list. So I didn't really do it for the pizza, I just did it because I wanted to be able to learn. Throughout, I think it started in second or third grade because they didn't get it for the younger ones, but we had book fairs that I loved. I remember getting the catalog and circling all the books that I wanted and I'd go home and ask my parents and they were just glad that I was into books and not something else. So they complied with some of the books that I liked. I remember "The Giver" as a standout; I read that in fourth grade and absolutely loved it. It's still one of my favorite books. I'm not really sure where it went from there but I was required to write for class and writing came second but we had to do book reports and things like that. I couldn't type very well so my mom would type it for me but I realized that I loved telling the story and what I thought about it. So whenever we had to do projects I always looked forward to it, after I think it was fourth grade that I got to typing and I took a keyboarding class in sixth grade which helped a whole lot and I've been writing ever since.