Everyone can recall their first reading memory. Maybe it is a about being held in your Mom’s arms while she reads to you. Maybe it is about the really pretty first grade teacher who used funny voices when she read aloud.
One of my favorite memories – although not my earliest – was of going to the Topeka Public Library – yes that would be in Kansas – during summer vacation. We would get the summer reading report card that had four pages with maybe ten lines on each page. My mom would take my sister Cheryl and me to go and check out a whole stack of books. Then when we returned them the next week with our record of what we read, the librarian would put a stamp next to every entry in the reading report card. And part of the challenge was completing not one, not two but as many as three report cards during the summer. If you read ten books a week, and they were children’s books so they were short, you could complete a report card in a month.
To this day, my friends would tell you that I am a fast reader, and that I have almost an encyclopedic memory about authors and books.
So those patterns – for all of us – are established when we are young and it influences our whole perspective on reading, what we like to read, when we like to read. And Raising A Reader shapes that reading patterns for thousands of children every year. That is why I am so proud to be a part of Raising A Reader MA. We are influencing thousands of children who will grow up and then shape the reading of their children – and their grandchildren.
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Raising A Reader MA Board Member Janet Porter has been a hospital administrator, consultant, and educator for 35 years. Currently a healthcare consultant with Stroudwater Associates, Janet was the Chief Operating Officer for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for six years. Janet served as the Associate Dean for Executive Education of the School of Public Health at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for seven years and Chief Operating Officer of Nationwide Children’s Hospital for nine years. A past chair of the board of Raising a Reader, Janet has a MHA from Ohio State University and a MBA and PhD from the University of Minnesota.