Fleur

Guest Writer

Today I was in Illusions Talk for the Wednesday afternoon Media Hour with Bigfoot, MediaWiz, and City Hall. We were discussing adversity and how people deal with it. At some point, I mentioned that I have a 40 year old cousin who is mentally challenged and taught himself how to read. Bigfoot asked me to write an article on how my cousin went about doing this.

When I was younger, in early grade school, I had just learned how to read and I was so proud of myself. I had many easy books that had one word on each page, such as cat, bed, dog, etc. Whenever my cousin would come over, I would read him my books. After hearing me read, my cousin decided that he was going to learn how to read and nothing was going to stop him.

My parents let him borrow one of my books, and when he came back the next week, he had learned to read the word cat. Knowing this was the only word he knew, I wrote down similar words, such as bat. As the weeks went by, he learned new words and the words that rhymed with them.

Then I went on vacation for two weeks. When I came back, he sat me down and said he wanted to show me something -- he then read me the whole book! I was so surprised. How did he learn the rest of the words? I don't know. His mom didn't even know how he learned the rest of them. It's still a mystery to us all, today because we didn't realize it was possible for someone illiterate to read like that within months!

Hope you enjoyed my story! See ya next time!

-Fleur