This is my first year on the intermediate school campus where we can read books, take AR tests, a test on the book we read to receive points and get prizes like colored pencils, erasers to erase animal shapes or sticky hands. At this point, I'm reading at a third-grade level, the minimum place teachers want a student to be. Because even if that were the case, my mother still made me stand on her table and read aloud to her, to my grandmother, and to all the customers who passed through the front door looking for flowers. At 8 years old, I'm finishing about 1 book a week but still struggling to pass all the tests, which has been a really frustrating thing because I've hardly won any of the prizes that my friends had and bragged about, yet my heels remained stuck in the ground without moving to stop. Later, when third grade was over and Summer was here, I was still sitting at my mother's workstation reading to her and anyone else who would listen. In the early stages of my reading, my mother was focused on the time I spent reading and the amount, but she wasn't as focused on my understanding of the words or the story being told through them. So, we made the switch. Now I read fewer books but gained a better understanding of words and their meanings. As soon as school started again, I passed the AR tests and even my friends in AR