Who am I? What makes me who I am? These are vital questions when growing up or getting to know people. I am Christian Beier, and at the current moment I am just a college athlete who’s going to school to get a major to have a career. When I was growing up there where a few things that helped me learned how to read and write. Those items were The Hobbit, The Leapfrog device, my teachers and my mom.
When I was much younger my mom said that we would always have story time before bed. One day she decided to switch the books around and grabbed The Hobbit. This was a paperback book with crinkled edges and a weird smell. We would sit on the couch together and she would start reading to me for 45 minutes to an hour. The Hobbit is about Bilbo Baggins a hobbit who live in the Shire. One day Gandolf the Grey, a wizard, comes to visit Bilbo and ask him to join the company of Dwarves to go take their home back. Bilbo then says no because Hobbits don’t leave the shire or go on adventures. Later that night one after another dwarves begin to arrive and once they had all arrived they ate all Bilbos food and drank all his ales. Then they ask Bilbo if he would accompany them back to their home the Lonely Mountain to take it back from the dragon Smaug. Bilbo still says no to them and so now the dwarves are extremely sad. The dwarves and Gandolf leave early the next morning without waking Bilbo. Bilbo then grabs his pack and bursts out the door running to meet up with the company. He finally makes it to them and says here’s the contract signed and then they welcome him to the company of Thorin Oakenshield, King under the Lonely Mountain. On their adventure they meet mountain trolls, cave goblins, elves, orks, and a dragon. In this story Bilbo meets Gollum another hobbit but one that has been corrupted by evil. Bilbo picks up a ring that belonged to Gollum. Gollum called it his precious. This is where Bilbo found the ring to rule them all. He then stole the ring from Gollum and by putting it on awoken the evil Sauron. This would end up leading to the Lord of the rings trilogy after this adventure ends. This book peaked my interest and lead me to read the other three books in this saga.
Another item that helped me learned how to read and write was the Leapfrog device and leapster. This device helped me learn on the go because it was portable and light. My mom didn’t care how much I was on it she was just happy that I was learning. There were games like batman where he threw a bat-a-rang and on it was a word and you would have to spell the word correctly or know the right definition that goes to it. Then there was another game where you had to shoot asteroids to get letters and those letters would spell a word and you would have to make the word base off the letters or a definition. This helped me learn how to spell and read while being more fun than what my teachers did.
My teachers are the last of the things that helped me learn to read and write. They did this using many techniques. Some of those techniques included using the alphabet, the large lined paper, spelling bees, and a few other techniques. When in the lower grades k-2 they emphasize the alphabet to help teach kids basic words like hat, cat, dog etc. The teacher would ask for a word that starts with a certain letter depending on when you were called on. Then teachers started using paper with large lines to help us learn to write the words we were saying instead of not knowing what these words look like. This is also when they taught us how legibility was important of writing and not being able to read and understand what we were writing on the page.
My mom is another influential literacy device because of her background. When she was in high school she had this English teacher called Mrs. Self and she was the meanest old lady to teach English. She made my mom learn proper English and grammar before college then when my mom went to college she had another teacher that was awful. One day he said that she was wrong and had her come up to explain why she was wrong and when she presented her side of the argument she ended up right. My mom learned proper English and grammar techniques and so from a young age she has made sure that every English paper she reread before I turned it in. She’d tell me and teach me about the English and grammar mistakes that were on the paper so once high school started I needed less help with my English papers.
