Kroger

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KROGER

(rhymes with ogre)

I started reading young.

I do not know whether it was a matter of natural inclination or at-home instruction (my mother, before she had additional children, may have been more inclined to be instructional in my developing years than she was later on with my siblings), of innate ability or genetic disposition (on my mother’s side of the family there are generations filled with teachers), or just plain right-time/right-place incalculable destiny, but as luck would have it, I started reading — aloud — at the age of two.

As the story goes (according to my mother), I was sitting in the child’s seat of my mom’s shopping cart at the grocery store, being my normal toddler self (whatever that means), when I decided to read the label on the cart handle.

Which, of course, from my viewpoint, would have been upside down. Because the logos/brand-names on the cart handles were meant to face the person pushing the cart (lest that person should forget which store they were shopping in).

So.

Upside down, at age two, I read to my mother:

Kroger! . . . kay, arr, oh, gee, ee, arr!

Most kids probably learn to spell words like ‘cat’ or ‘mom’ before they move on to two-syllable words. (And these days, I can tell you from working with elementary students, that many kids can barely even do those words at ages six and seven.)

But I was not, and have never been ‘most kids’.

So my first word was K-R-O-G-E-R.

Kroger.

{Thus we can likely easily trace the psychological connection between reading at age two and my odd delight in grocery shopping (regardless of the distressing cost1 attached to the latter) at age 47.}

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Do you know what age you were when you first learned to read?

What words did you most easily recognize as a child?

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Letter K

I am focusing my A-to-Z posts this year around the topic of READING.

To read more from fellow challenge participants, or to see how you can join in yourself, please click the badge above.

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1This is a topic I mean to revisit soon.

10 thoughts on “Kroger”

  1. KDPierre

    Good for you, you little smarty-pants. LOL I don’t when I started reading, but it wasn’t precociously early. My daughter however began reading with me for the first time while she was a pre—-pre-school toddler, (but older than two) and we were waiting for pizza in a parking lot. I remember the look on her face even all these years later when she realized how the letters she had learned and the sounds they represented could be used to decode these previously inscrutable, adult things called words. It was like she broke the enigma code! LOL

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  3. ktz2

    I have no memory of reading my first word but in the first & second grades I was in the so-called advanced reading group. A memory of young childhood reading was that the spelling of some words didn’t match the pronunciation, confusing me – the first of those were ‘says’ and ‘said’. When I asked why I didn’t get any meaninful explanation – ‘that’s just the way it is’.

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  4. Deborah Weberh

    Great story. I was a young reader too – in fact, I read a lot more than I talked, and I think there was some concern over that. But many, many years later, I think I figurGred out the reason. My brother, who was a couple of years older, was an incredible chatterbox. He often followed my much older sister around and hammered at her. One day she told him he had to be careful. That people only got so many words, and once they were used up, that was it. It may not have worked on him, but I certainly took it to heart. 🙂

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