High School and Life Changing Experience

          My junior year in high school I took this class called Children’s Literature.  In this class we learned how to read books to children.  I learned the importance of practicing books before you read them to the kids.  Kids love when you do different voices for different characters, but that takes practice.  There are two different approaches to reading a picture book.  I remember loving this as a child.  You can show the students the pictures while you read it or you can have students form a picture in their own minds and then show them the picture.  Every Monday we would go to the local elementary school and go and read to the kids before they went to school.  This was one of my first experiences with kids in a school setting.  This made me want to become a teacher even more.  These kids where so excited about books.  They were really engaged with the books. Our final project in this class was a study on a author.

            This school year I was able to see kids listening to books again.  I work in daycare with preschool age kids.  After I was done with work I would go directly to my field work classroom, which was at the kindergarten level.  The amount of growth that kids make between preschool and kindergarten is crazy.  I would read books to both groups of kids and you could see how much they grow.  Many of the preschoolers had a hard time to sitting through the whole book.  The kindergartners would ask questions throughout the whole book.