Children's book that made a difference in my life.

Any book that had any difference in my life was read to me.  This was most likely due to the way my second grade teacher managed to get even the most disengaged students to focus just long enough so she can read to us.  I recall spending an entire unit on was Roald Dahl which I have come to embrace due to its wit and creativity.  This is my first recollection of reading fantasy fiction on my own.  This changed my life in the sense that I started to have a unique imagination.  His use of giants, witches, and talking foxes were very different than what I had read before.

This was around third grade, I had just moved to the United States from Japan, and my english grammar and vocabulary was limited.  I was learning Japanese when I was in kindergarden at a public school in Tokyo.  Pedagogical approaches were naturally very different, but I was happy that I was able to transition comfortably.  However, I missed out on a lot of the books that my classmates in the United States read in Kindergarden when I moved to the United States.  I was therefore enrolled in the school's ESL program to improve my English.  This inadvertently discouraged me from learning in class as I lost confidence in myself being taken away from the classroom everyday.   However, I was happy to be able to take part in my regular class's reading time.  Otherwise, I would probably not have been exposed to Roald Dahl.  I found his stories very humorous and entertaining, which encouraged me to read more books in English.  I was then able to improve my english skills more rapidly than had I never been exposed to his books.