Running a Marathon Just to Read Good Morning, Im Daniella Gual and Im here with Sami Wortman on Channel 7.

8 news. Breaking news at the top of the hour, stay tuned. Sami and I sat on folding chairs in her parents bedroom nearly floating in Mr.Wortmans big-and-tall blazers. Were reporting live from behind their bedside table, which was embellished with empty coffee mugs and scripts, one with pictures for me and the other with words. Take 1. Daniella, your next lines are about the weather, remember its sunny, high of 70, low of 63 and no chance of raining cat and dogs. Got it?! Yep, think so, I said. Sami, my best friend was already an avid and accomplished reader. Me, well I couldnt read just yet. Instead, I was forced to memorize the news and exercise my creative juices in the form of crayon scribbles of cats, dogs and the sun, in case my memory failed. After all, the pressure was on; producing a live broadcast home video required eloquent flow and seeming ease in transition from the weather report to the story of the local heroic fireman. The underlying issue remained: I couldnt read. So, my parents made tutors readily available. Turn to page 46, the story about the frogs and before you start, lets go over the comprehension questions in the back. Read them out loud, said Mrs. Garcia, a gentle and brawny elder. The d-a-w-g-s, stuttering p-l-a-d Lets go over p-l-a-d again, sound it out, p-l-a-y with an ay sound at the end. The dogs play. Excellent! Weekly, Mrs. Garcia and I met in my playroom for about a year and a half plowing through workbooks and comprehension questions. There wasnt exponential progress being made, more a crawling Tortoise and the Hare like movement. Each week, I would learn to read a handful of words and phrases and hope that in the following session I would be able to read one of them. Since Mrs. Garcia was an authority figure to me as well as my kindergarten teacher, I never made excuses as to why I couldnt go over the next set of questions. The tutoring guaranteed my parents two solid hours of reading and comprehension without bargaining ten pages of The Frog and Toad Treasury for a trip to the toy store. Afterschool, my mom and I went by the local childrens library to comb the shelves. I relished books about dragons, probably because they were the most dynamic mythical creatures that made series of books with 3 word sentences possible. I spit fire. I can fly. And trust me they had the capacity to feature countless mind-numbing variations of my examples. Then right before bed wed read Eloise and her misadventures, in one of Manhattan's most lavish and historic hotels, The Plaza. It wasnt for the lack of effort and support of my parents, if anything they were too devoted. A gear wasnt igniting in my cranium to translate the foreign text I was staring at. Everything else checked out; I was sociable, identified numbers, shapes, colors and my math skills were on par unless faced with a word problem.

Second grade came along, and by then my peers were zipping through Junie B. Jones and the daring were conquering the storied series of Harry Potter. 2002 was the year of Daniella, at age eight a breakthrough came and I could read. My newfound literacy couldnt be attributed to any magical program that baby whispers claim can teach your kid to read by 14 months or a lump of cash thrown to 1-800-Hooked on Phonics. Spontaneous creativity occurred, the gears were turning swiftly and were high on the discovery of the written word. I set fire to books, getting through them at breakneck speed. I was Mario Andretti of elementary school literature. The nurturing environment of tutors, libraries and the keen emphasis on the importance of reading gave me the tools to read. My Mom stayed at home to raise me and my Dad was a successful photographer. Dinner was a sizzling intellectual potluck of the Bush presidency, the War in Afghanistan and the rise of social networks. My upbringing gave me a boost, whereas most students that struggled as much as I did to read would have slipped through the cracks at school and their potential would be wasted. Parents are the first and most important literacy sponsor in a childs life; Im just lucky enough my parents recognized that. They gave me the drive to keep pushing myself and the opportunities to flourish throughout my literacy progress. I consider them my number one literacy sponsors because without them I wouldnt have gotten the tutors necessary in my early ages and who knows what my literacy skills couldve been like now. I am grateful where I am today, an accomplished sophomore at the University of Central Florida perusing a career in Advertising in Public Relations, a major in which fluency in literacy is very important.