My Journey….

My name is Jamèk Turner and I learned how to read and write in multiple ways that has benefitted me as a person and student. I first started to learn the basics to reading when my grandmother read to me just as she did with all the daycare children that she had in her in-home daycare. Then, I started to learn certain letters and words which helped in reading and writing. Learning how to trace letters and words was another tool that helped me. Reading stories and then writing a paper on it strengthened my reading writing skills. Lastly, writing informative papers over the summer before college and presenting the papers in front of friends and family helped strengthen my writing skills.

My grandmother uses to sit me down every day when I was with her and bring out the bold, foam alphabet mat where I can sit on it and point out the letters while she said the letters out to me. While she would do that I can remember the faint sound of babies crying in the background from the in-home daycare she runs in her home. I never really got a break from learning from my grandmother as she took every opportunity that was given to her to teach me something involving the alphabet, words, colors, or animals. I used to have a speech impediment, so it made teaching me to pronounce words a little more difficult than it usually would. I was ahead of my learning curve for my age. My grandmother would make pasta that would be so savory in your mouth after she taught me something new and I succeeded in learning it on the first try due to what I knew was waiting for me if I succeeded. My grandmother and I would sit on the sofa with a sippy cup in my hand and a coffee mug in hers and I would listen to her read The Cat in The Hat. That book meant a lot to me because I was so drawn in to The Cat in The Hat due to the vivid pictures and rhyming scheme that Dr. Seuss included in that book.

On some days I could smell when my grandmother made a good cheesecake, those were the days I knew that I would have some sort of break from learning a whole lot. My grandmother sat me in front of the tv with Barney, The Wiggles, Sesame Street, and Zoboomafoo on for me to learn some new and informative tools. When I would wake up in the mornings from staying over my grandparents’ house the first thing I could hear were nursery rhymes playing on the television from tapes she had. While listening to the nursery rhymes while still in bed I then could start smelling fresh pancakes being made. On some occasions my grandmother would tell me to count to ten or sing my alphabet before I could take a bite of food she made in the morning. By my grandmother drilling me on my alphabets and making sure I remember the information that I attained it helped me to remember relatively everything that she had taught me.

I would then grow old enough to attend elementary school in which I came in a little more advanced than some of the other kids in my class. The class would sit in colored boxes that were on a rugged mat on the cold floor and would sing the alphabet, listen to the teacher read stories to us and help us trace our letters properly in the My ABC Tracing Book. The activity in which I had a difficult time in was tracing my letters properly because I had bad handwriting and my grandmother rarely worked on writing letters and words with me. The harsh eyes my teacher would give me once I gave her the tracing paper back with the tracings not on the dotted line was what struck fear into my body. I would then receive extra lessons on how to trace properly and then actually write these letters and words out while the rest of the class was singing the alphabet and listening to the other teacher in the room read them a story.

Using my skills of tracing and writing learned in elementary school, when in middle and high school I had a better chance to write better when my teachers would pair us up in groups to read a story of the groups choosing, write some things you like about it and that you learned from it, and then reenact what you learned in the story to the class. I found this beneficial to me and my class because it helped us to like reading, be more confident in presenting in front of people, and it helped with our writing as well. I would read a book every day until I was finished with it whether I liked it or not I would write some interesting facts or new information or words I didn’t know from the story down, so I can look it up and go over them on my own time. By doing this it helped me be a better studier while I was in school and it helped me be more advanced in the classes I was in. I read the story To Kill a Mockingbird and I thoroughly enjoyed that story due to the vivid imagery and the suspense that I felt from reading that story. After reading the story the class had wrote a paper on the story describing how we felt about the story, how the author used certain tools to attract a certain audience and what information or new words and phrasing we took from reading the story. From writing that paper we did some peer editing and that helped me to understand some different viewpoints of the story I had not thought about beforehand.

Over the summer I trained myself to read everything I saw or received from somewhere. I eventually would just start reading the newspaper for fun after I would eat my breakfast in the morning. I did a lot of writing over the summer as well for my personal use and because my mom wanted me to keep typing up papers on some things I may learn in college or get out from college. I wrote about two different papers over the summer about what I need to accomplish as a student to get to what my future has in store for me. After writing these papers I would read them to different friends or family members, so I can build my confidence up with not only writing but presenting the reading that I had wrote at that time. I now have some sort of confidence to write papers and present the readings that I had wrote down on or typed up on the paper.

Resulting from the tools that was used to help me to learn to read and write it not only put me ahead of the learning curve a bit, but it also helped me to get up at this point of my life as a first-year college student. Having a grandmother help teach you some fundamentals such as learning your alphabet, reading to you as a child and making sure that not only are you learning the material but also retaining the information is a key moment in my life. My grandmother also sat me in front of shows that were not only fun to watch but also taught me other reading and writing properties such as certain phrases to use and how to pronounce certain letters and words. Being in a school where they teach you how to trace and write down letters and words will also help in your writing skills. Reading books as a class and then working on a paper about what you read will help with reading and writing because not only are you going in depth of what you read but you’re putting all of that onto paper or in a typed paper. Lastly, writing informative writings and presenting them in front of people on my own time helped me to be a better writer and be more comfortable with presenting the writings I generated on paper. Having multiple tools as a child helped me fundamentally with my reading and writing, some people may have other ways they learned but at the close of business we all learned some way to read and write to get to where we are today.