From FOOT Book to FOOTball

Reading has benefited me in several ways, from the time I was born and still today. By the time I was six months old, it was evident that I enjoyed being read to. Not even being able to crawl, I would roll to the stack of books in anticipation of my mom reading to me at nap time. A favorite book of mine during the rolling phase was Dr. Seuss's The Foot Book.
I learned basic colors when I was eighteen months old because my grandfather read a book about colors to me every day. For a long time after that, I described everything by its color, whether the description was necessary or not.
Later, but before I began pre-school, my favorite books to hear my mom read became Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff. I also enjoyed hearing my dad read The Berenstain Bears-The Big Road Race and The Berenstain Bears Go Out For the Team.
In pre-school, I learned letter sounds and during the following summer, I learned to read three-letter words like "dog," "cat," "rat" and "bat." Once I started kindergarten, I began to read. I could read sentences, paragraphs, and complete stories; and it made me feel very smart!
I still enjoyed listening to my mom read despite being able to read myself. We read the Little House On the Prairie series. In elementary school, I started reading novels on my own. Some of my favorite novels were The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis and the Alex Rider series by Anthony Horowitz. In eighth grade, I read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and understood why these Twain books are so famous. For a ninth grade summer English assignment I read Silas Marner, by George Eliot. The book I most recently read was Through My Eyes, an autobiography of NFL quarterback Tim Tebow.
Not frequently, but occasionally in my free time, I used to enjoy reading joke books and church bulletin bloopers for a good laugh. I also enjoyed reading comic books with my dad. Now in my free time, one of my favorite hobbies is reading college football news, which has given me the ability to argue with the best about who the next Razorbacks coach should be, how the national champion should be determined, and anything else to do with college football. In both serious and trivial ways, reading has been a great benefit to me and a big part of my life.