by Blanche Podhajski
I love literacy because of precious memories. My mother and big sister worked in beautiful stone buildings that housed the libraries in my home town. I remember them bringing home treasures of books they would read to me as a preschooler.
That’s probably where my love of language began. Curious George, Madeline and Babar became as close friends to me as Ruthie who lived down the street.
Learning to read when I entered Kindergarten couldn’t happen fast enough. But I was disappointed just reading sight words like run, jump and Spot which characterized instruction in my educational era. I was so much more excited when Miss Avery taught us about “magic e” in first grade and then showed us how to rhyme by changing initial letter sounds. I was off and really reading!
I remember curling up into a chair a few years later with the entire Freddy the Pig series. I felt especially proud that I could decode the title of Freddy and the Ignormus. I enjoyed talking at the dinner table about what an “ignormus” might be.
