How television shaped my early reading development

Learning to Read

My earliest recollection of learning to read comes from watching television. As a young child, my parents thought it was best to leave me and my siblings in front of the television in order to serve as a babysitter. From these experiences is where I believe I taught myself to read.

Seasme Street and The Electric Company, two shows broadcasted on public television throughout the day served as a daily interjections of reading lessons that were most likely designed for that purpose. I can also recollect other educational television programs such as Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood and The Great Space Coaster as other sources of reading knowledge.

These experiences sitting in front of the television merely served as an impetus to my learning. To me, reading feels like a skill that needs to be practiced, and this skill can be honed or entropy depending on the frequency of use. In some ways, as a young person learning to read, I was actually better at the skill than I have been at other times of my life. This is due in large part to the imagination and its role it plays in reading.

I have a general positive attitude about my reading development skills and feel that they still can improve however. Learning to read is an ongoing process that does not stop once somebody has mastered an alphabet and can put a few sentences together. The more I read and appear to learn the more my ignorance appears. I am constantly learning new words, phrases and dialects as I investigate new texts.