The Battle of the Books

This silly title was encouraged by the battle between those who love to hold a "real" book in their hand and those who enjoy digital books. I have admitted that when Nook came out with a brand new e reader I said, "I don't need that!" That was until I saw one and heard about all the free books you could get on a regular basis. Then libraries starting carrying them too which meant you could check out library book from your house. How cool is that? I started from that, but when I actually used one it grew to so many other reasons. My first e reader was the original Nook 1. It didn't have any of the bells and whistles that e readers have now. Here is what I loved about that. I could enlarge my text and their was zero glare in the sun. That meant I could sit on a bench at the park and read while my boys ran around. No headache from reading in the sun. Today you can change the background color of your page, the way our view the text, and the size of the text. You can do daytime or nighttime mode and the reader has built in light. Why or Why does any of this matter. I struggled to learn how to read. I was in a small private school and I don't even remember learning phonics. Everything was taught in little books called paces. I didn't have the benefit of much auditory explanation. I went to public school kindergarten. I don't remember doing much there except tracing letters. My brother was getting bullied at school and my mother was worried. She encouraged forcefully that we all go to Christian school. Although kids will always pick on the weird kid, things get far less physical in a private school. I had tutors in school for the first couple of years because I couldn't read all the instructions. I did finally read over the summer after first grade. The Readers the school had were those Dick and Jane books which are just terrible. With Paces there are paragraphs with instructions every time you start something new. That was loads and loads of reading. I never finished my work between being slow and being bored while trapped inside my table box. They use cubicles all the time in businesses, but to be in it all day for a child. Yuck! In second grade they used to make me stay after school for not finishing my work. So I got to stay there even longer. In Middle school they had geography if you finished your work. Guess who didn't learn geography in Elementary school? I had achievement testing like all the other kids. They would get nervous faces over my super low scores. I never was tested by a specialist. It was the eighties. They barely knew about learning disabilities back then. So how could I learn to love reading? I figured out a way to struggle through if I cared about what I was reading. For hard stuff like studying in college, I had to read out loud a lot. My sister in law loves to read and I started borrowing books from her. I discovered I could enjoy it. It just takes me a little longer to finish. I finally learned phonics. I still can't use it to read, but I understand it. Those e books are wonderful because it is so much easier to focus on the page. For my Bible club I use crayons to high light the verses in all different colors. Really helps. The black and white seem to be the issue. It is great to get lost in a book for just a little while.