When I was younger I was the type of kid that didn’t like to do anything that involved any sort of activity using my brain. I, along with my older brother, would sit around all day (especially during the summer) and play our Nintendo 64. We could and would play them for hours at a time. Since I did this at an early age, I could kind of get away with it because I did not really have any homework but when I did it was rarely or not much. My mother would constantly yell at me to get off the game. I think that she would say things at the time that didn’t really register at the time like “you could be doing something better with your time”. As my brother got older he soon began to understand what she was saying. I still played video games while some people my age were doing something more productive.

When I was in school I think that it was obvious that the amount of time that I spent playing video games was correlated with my reading skill. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was in the 2^nd or 3^rd grade. At my school as well as a lot of other schools we had different reading groups for different strengths. There was the lowest reading group that were the kids who noticeably had trouble reading, would stutter, and would stumble over words frequently. There was the average reading group (the one I was in) that occasionally would have these problems. Then there was the highest reading group that was filled with kids that were not excellent but good readers. Looking back I think this idea was pretty harsh being only in the elementary school and categorizing students. I, along with my parents thought that I was a better than the average. The brutal truth is that I was not. At this point I knew how to read but just could not read fluently. I would sound like a robot when I read reading one word at a time.

My journey to becoming a better reader began the summer that I was going into the 7^th grade. My mother played a very big role in my success. She decided that she was going to have me read 30 to 45 minutes a day so my skills will improve. She made me read out loud so that I could get used to hearing myself so when I stumbled over something I would know and could fix it. Since I was into sports the book of choice was a biography about Grant Hill’s life. Every night at the same time we would read and progressively I got better.

When I came back to school that next year (7^th grade) I felt like a completely different person/reader because of my summer reading. I was all of a sudden getting complements about how well I was reading when we read out loud in class. This is really not a story about how I became literate but instead a story about how I became fluent in reading.