My Journey Learning to Read and Write

I am Ethan Jarmush and I grew up in Eldersburg, Maryland. I’ve always been quite laid back and don’t take anything too seriously. I enjoy reading books but not ones that are a requirement because I enjoy a very specific selection and I am a very slow reader. It’s surprising that reading faster was not something they practiced in school when they know that kids are going to have to read books in their later school careers and in a short time period. Now that I am 18 years old I am far beyond learning to read and write and am now expanding those abilities and making them better. But when i was just starting to learn at the age of 5, I didn’t know anything and I did whatever my parents or teacher told me to do without any complaints. Along with the specific tools I used, this allowed me to garner the right skills needed to learn to read and write.

Back when I was in Freedom Elementary school in kindergarten I had a teacher named Mrs. Hildenbrand. In the beginning of the school year she gave each of us a regular marbleized notebook that was called the “at home story response journal”. Each week she would require us to go the library and choose a book on a certain topic. We would have to read the book then either draw a picture or answer a question that was related to the book. I forgot this existed until I went home and sifted through my old school work from elementary school that my mom kept in storage. I found this notebook a little beat up because of how old it was and how little I cared about it since I was very young. I went through each page and read about all the books I read and all the questions I answered, most of which were very dumb but I didn’t expect myself at 5 to be giving a college level analysis of Junie B. Jones and the Yucky Blucky Fruitcake. There was all different kinds of books I used to read and a surprising amount of these books were about animals like a Zoo book or a national geographic book. This helped me to learn all the different types of animals, what they looked like, what they sounded like, and where they lived, which also incidentally helped me learn all the different places around the world. There was also notes on how I was doing in class like if I needed to read more fluently, which was usually my problem. This allowed my parents to help me work on those subjects before bed by having me read some books to them which allowed them to give me pointers on what I can do to improve my reading. Half of the writing in the questions I answered was spelled wrong which is surprising to me because I would have thought my parents would have helped me answer the questions. But I guess it was for the best that I learned on my own what I should and shouldn’t do in those types of situations.

At about the same time that I was completing these journals, there was a computer game called Pajama Sam. It was about a young kid named Sam who dressed up as his favorite superhero, Pajama Man, and defeated his nemesis, Darkness. This may sound stupid but when I was about 5 years old this game was glorious. It was a very simple point and click game from the late 90’s where you solved puzzles and explored the world. Most of the world you could interact with and it would make a wacky noise when you clicked on something of interest all while a nice little soundtrack would play in the background of each zone. I must have beaten that game 100 times before I realized there was not only many sequels to the game, but there were many books as well. SInce I was really into reading back then, I had to get myself a copy of the book. This book was entitled Pajama Sam: Mission to the Moon and was about Pajama Sam having to turn up the moon light then try to find a way back to Earth. Just like the game, I finished that book many times before I went to bed because it not only helped me become a better reader by becoming more fluent and pronouncing difficult words, but also because I just really enjoyed it.

Along with Pajama Sam, there was another educational type of system that helped me learn. I know a lot of kids back then had one of these and it was the LeapPad learning system. It came in a big bulky green and blue case that opened up to reveal the book you would earn to read with. It even came with it’s own stylist and you would insert a cartridge into the side of the case that would help you along with the book. All the different types of books you could get are interactive and they will make sounds, play music, and allow you to play games on it. Due to my young age this really intrigued me and ended up using it a lot in my free time. It not only entertained me quite a lot but it really helped me learn to read because if I didn’t know a certain word, I could tap it and have it spelled out, read aloud, or even sounded out which got me my basic understand of many words at a young age.

Also in the boxes full of my old schoolwork, I found a ton of that old tannish colored lined paper that had the two solid lined with a lot of room between them and a light dotted line in the middle of them. I remember using this paper a lot in second grade in Mrs. Johnston’s class. I wrote a lot of different stories and school work on this type of paper and it allowed me to practice my handwriting and write the letters and words correctly. I brought back one of these papers to my dorm and this story was about Pokémon and how my dad bought me a Pokémon game and some new cards. This must have obviously been very exciting to me if I chose to practice my writing in school. I had a blank piece of paper stapled to the back of this paper of a bunch of Pokémon that I drew and named. There was a comic series called spy vs spy about two spies trying to kill each other in each comic which sounds pretty brutal for a 6 year old to be reading but it was light hearted and humorous so it was okay. But I remember writing a ton of different spy vs spy stories on these papers of my own fights between the two spies. This helped me not only become better at writing letters but allowed me to become a better writer in general and better at getting stories and ideas onto paper. These stories that I wrote influenced me today because I may end up becoming a screenwriter/director and practicing writing stories since a young age really helped me focus on what is good story writing and what I should keep out of my stories.

This process of learning to read and write will influence my future because no matter what profession I go into, reading and writing, especially at the college level, is a major skill that all jobs require. If I choose to be a business owner then I can relate these skills to that but I choose to be a screenwriter then reading and writing will be almost all of what I will be doing. Getting all my ideas down coherently and using excellent vocabulary are things that I’ve been improving since I first started how to read and write.