Reading and Writing have had an immense impact on my life as well as many others. The ground work for anyone is being literate. This is how we obtain the things in life we need to become successful individuals, but we all didn’t just start out knowing how to read and write and be functional. As a nineteen-year-old, I am fully literate and I have graduated from Lacey Township High school, in Forked River New Jersey. I have moved on in my academics to higher education at Stevenson University where I am successful on the soccer field and the classroom. With all this being said, there were some influences and devices that helped me get to this point. Without being literate, there is no way any of my success so far in life would be remotely possible.
Furthermore, as far back as I could remember I believe the process of becoming literate started around age 5. I was in kindergarten, I had Ms. Smith as my teacher and every morning we would play this spelling game. The game consisted of using red plastic spelling blocks and the first student to spell the word Ms. Smith asked us to spell, won that round. The competition of the game inspired me to win every round and as a 5-year-old my spelling dramatically improved in a short window of time. Also as a part of that class, we used an online computer tool called reader rabbit. It was a game that had a story behind it but the only way to continue the story was to spell certain words correctly at different checkpoints along the way. I also took this as a competition and I tried to finish the story as fast as I could. It would record your completion time when you were finished so I always tried to beat the time I had previously. These two ways of reading and spelling really improved my literacy and gave me the building blocks to move in a positive direction with my education.
To continue, as I progressed into the higher elementary grades there were two things we always did to improve our reading and writing. In about first grade, we started doing our weekly spelling tests and story completion. It composed of receiving a set of words at the beginning of the week and throughout the week performing tasks like using the words in a sentence or writing them down ten times each to better engrain the words in our minds. At the end of the week we would have a test on how to spell all the words and test would be graded. As far as our reading went, we were given a book to read throughout the week and at the end of the week we were asked to recall the events of the book in a test. These two processes help me personally greatly because it was an opportunity to learn more complex words and it forced me to read the books thoroughly because I knew would have to recall the events of the book in a test format. Naturally, the words and the books got harder as I progressed from grades 1-6 but the same ideas were used and it trained me to be ready for real novels in my middle school grades that were on the horizon.
As my progression continued in my educational career, I moved onto junior high and middle school years. This is where I actually started to like reading after discovering a few good books. The most memorable of these books was The Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. The books have a decent amount of pages that were written in a mature way but at the end of every page there was an illustration. It made it easier for me to put the characters and plots together at the time. These books really prepared me for the more complex books I would have to read in my later years. Another book I really enjoyed and benefitted from was a book called Chasing Lincolns Killer. I enjoyed the realness of the historical events and it intrigued me to continue my reading further in any way I could. These two types of texts in general really helped me propel myself into higher reading.
After being so interested in reading in my middle school years, I began to drift from daily reading. It was not until my Senior year that I got back to reading. I had to do some research for my Senior Paper and I stumbled on some articles that were referred to me by my English teacher. I enjoyed the articles so much that I subscribed to a few websites and began reading them daily. I felt like this really expanded my learning even though I don’t have a specific book to read. It made me really enjoy reading again and I have continued this habit today.
To summarize, It’s pretty evident that my Literacy has come a long way since my Computer reading games days, and I have many teachers and my parents to thank for that. I hope continue increasing my literacy throughout the future and especially here at college. Most importantly, I won’t forget how I got to this point. Its been a long Journey to get to this point but it has definitely been beneficial for me. I feel like I’m well prepared and ready to get a job and make a living thanks to the people that helped me along my Literacy Journey.
Diary of a wimpy kid was one of my favorite series growing up as well. The handwriting style the author, Jeff Kinney, used makes it more enjoyable to read. I completely understand how it feels to like reading, but drift away from it.