G and H: Grandparents and High School Years

G is for Grandparents. My Grandma and Grandpa Midtgard were the first two people to really encourage me to pick up a book. My parents both had busy schedules during my youth, so my grandparents would watch my sister and me during the daytime. Each day they came, they would have a brand new book for each of us. They brought Dr. Seuss books, Berenstain Bear books, and Little Golden books. When we were really young, they would read to us, and as the days went by, we finally grew into reading to them.

I just recently found many of the books they gave me as a child, and I've incorporated them into my private library. It brought back so many memories to go through the books. My grandparents introduced me to The Cat in the Hat and Fox in Socks, in turn, opening doors to various worlds within my imagination. They taught me to extend my reading as well. Once we read a book, we would do an activity with it. Sometimes my grandmother would ask me how I felt about a certain situation, my grandfather would help me draw a picture from the book, or we would even construct scenes from the book out of clay. I think it is quite obvious that my grandparents' influence on my literacy history has definitely made an impact on who I am today.

Edward and Annabelle Midtgard

H is for High School Years. I really developed my love for reading during high school thanks to my English teachers Dianne Searfoss and Kelli Malchow. In their classes, we read books that I had never even picked up before. I was introduced to excellent pieces of American literature and British literature, as well as authors like Twain, Dickens, Hawthorne, Steinbeck, and Shakespeare.

I was challenged greatly in my high school English classes. My teachers asked questions that made me think in ways that I never had before. I wrote literary analysis pieces that motivated me to dive deeper into novels to hypothesize what the authors truly meant by writing their characters in certain ways, and I started reading complex pieces of literature in my leisure time. My high school English classes were very similar to the literature classes I took in college, and, at times, even more challenging. I think my high school years showcased my biggest growth as a reader in my literacy history.

Kelli Malchow and Dianne Searfoss