Pre-school Reading
Herrmann, Andrea

ANDREA: This is a literacy story about wanting to learn how to read. In my family, they were all readers and as soon as everybody would come home from work or school or whatever, they'd all be reading. So I used to beg my parents to teach me how to read. My mother had a philosophy that I had to wait until I'd go to school and then I would be taught properly how to read. I remember one time I was begging my sister who was just learning how to read to teach me something about reading and so she got out a chalk board and everything she learned that day she would teach me and we did that for a while but then she got bored with it so my lessons weren't very long. But one day when I was in kindergarten and I still hadn't learned how to read, she had a handkerchief that had something like monkey see, monkey do, do you see me, I see you. There were little pictures in each corner with the writing so she taught me by looking at the pictures what phrase to say. So I wasn't reading or course but I went to school and I took my handkerchief and I told the teacher that I knew how to read. So she said, "Oh well show me." And of course I did and I felt like a little cheat but I was also happy that I looked like a reader and she dragged me around to the different classes and I had to perform for all the classes. So that was my first experience of reading but also of feeling like somebody who's sort of dishonest about it.