My Grandmother and her Motivation to Get Me to Read

by Asher Raymond

In the beginning, I loved to draw and to write my own stories to read to my parents and sisters at night. Then, as I got older, I tried to draw pictures of dogs, basketball players and whatnot. Superheroes were hard for me, so I would just draw anything. I liked to read books about action-adventure, but when I first moved here I liked to draw and hated to read. Let me tell you a little about that.

When I first moved here I only knew how to read in Hebrew because I had been living in Israel. When I was in Israel my grandmother paid for two years of lessons in how to read and write in English. So when I first moved here I wasn’t good at reading. I only liked to play sports. But my grandmother always encouraged me to read. I moved here in third grade—that’s when I didn’t like books because I wasn’t good at it. But slowly, with my grandmother’s help, I got better at reading.

I look up to my grandmother as a great person. I love her a lot and I only get to see her once a year because she lives in Los Angeles. But slowly, with her encouragement, I was reading chapter books by the end of third grade. Now I’m in the seventh grade and nearing my bar mitzvah. I’ve read a lot of books, and now I read every night for about two hours. Thanks to my grandmother and her love for me and my future, I can read well, and I hope she can make it for my bar mitzvah.