Tag: literacy

The Life of James

 

During the afternoon of a cool crisp day in Coon Rapids, Minnesota on June 27th ,1999, a boy with two lazy eyes named James was born to Kevin Hartner and Beth Hartner. Growing up and being the youngest of four boys prove to be a struggle at times. I felt like I didn’t get as much attention so I became independent growing up. Due to my father getting promotions in the Postal Service, my family has packed up shop and left to live in Colorado when I turned five and then to Maryland at the age of thirteen. Being the independent kid I was, it was hard to make friends but every friend that I had made seemed to be long lasting relationships that prove to not be fatal.
Over the course of my youth and early adulthood, I had experienced major bumps in the road that dealt with my literacy skills. At the age of four, I didn’t grasp the requirements that a boy my age should know in speaking abilities. The struggles caused me to see a speech therapist usually every Thursday. Walking into the building always turned my stomach around as I was never attracted to strangers and only felt normal around my family. The halls were wide and even after every step I took, the halls felt endless to me. The chipped white paint haunted me as I felt like I was closer to my doom. As we arrived in the therapist’s office space though, the small room was covered from head to toe with pop culture items that made my four-year-old self smile from ear to ear. With pictures of things that I had enjoyed, and enjoyable lessons like sounding out words by using pictures, my therapy sessions seemed to go by a lot easier, in which helped me advance my speaking and reading abilities into school.
In my elementary scholar years, I grew a larger array of reading abilities. During my third-grade year and beyond that, my classes had literature circles. These literature circles caused my reading abilities to sky rocket because the book was read to us and we were to discuss it as a class. It also gave me my first step in the water of using many literary devices like inferring, and being able to paraphrase a text to my own words. These circles caused my knowledge to broaden fast, both with the help of the teacher and the classmates. It also taught me to sound out words that I didn’t know and break those words down to figure out the meanings.
As I got into Middle School, the rise of technology proved to be an effective use inside of school. During my seventh-grade year, my language arts teacher was an avid geek when it came to technology, incorporating any type to every lesson if possible. It was a nice transition as any previous courses I had taken prior to that were filled with boring, and silent reading. With this, I could interact with other resources that actually made the subject enjoyable. My teacher, Mr. Schuster felt like a superhero to me, as he helped show the lighter side of reading and writing and helped guide every student to further the strives for knowledge. It was a time when technology was being introduced into education, and with his help, it was easier to navigate through websites and use the proper resources.
Jumping into High School was a whole different ball game. There weren’t many vocabulary tests, but instead a large selection of writing pieces in almost every class. Some teachers would shoot my ideas down, while others praised them. The one teacher who seemed to enjoy and hate my writing was one of my social studies teacher. I remember one day I received my graded paper back and he said, “I love your writing, but you say too much.” Even though it was a backhanded compliment and I shrugged it off at the time, I felt devastated. I didn’t know how to shorten my paper or any of my future writings. It made me realize though that I needed to learn to be “short and sweet,” and not let my ideas go off the tracks. With that realization, I felt able to condense my papers for future assignments in which it helped me stay on topic without writing about something totally random. It also helped me use descriptive words to my advantage too. Instead of using whole sentences to explain something, I could use descriptive language to get to the point quicker.
Literacy is used in everyday life. Whether it’s in the past, present, or future, events will help you grab onto knowledge to further progress in the abilities to read, write, and speak. I know these events will guide me through a bright future because they have taught me so much. I have a lot to learn but over the past eighteen years, I have learned so much in which I can tackle on the world if I so desired. These lessons have taught me to be a better writer, a speaker, a reader, and listener. With the knowledge I have now, I plan to further use it in my years getting my degree in Applied Mathematics. With this knowledge, I also plan to write my way into the job field as being an actuary or an engineer. Both the English language and mathematics come together to create something wonderful, and I want to be a piece of that. These experiences and lessons have also showed me to express my feelings through the use of language that I never thought I would achieve at such an early age. Without the help from my teachers and the constructive criticism I had received, I wouldn’t be the person that I am today. Every day there is a new lesson to learn, and from now on, I plan to use that to my full advantage. With every lesson, literacy is tied to all of them.

 

 

 

Citations:

Darwinek, Flag-map of Maryland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flag-map_of_Maryland.svg (Maryland flag)
Energepic.com Writing https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-hands-woman-pen-110473/ (Woman writing)

Marchini, Leonardo. Colorado, Sign, Welcome, Travel – Free Image on Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/en/colorado-sign-welcome-travel-usa-1279373/ (Welcome sign of Colorado)

The other two pictures are of me as a child.

 

 

An Old Woman and A Cold Woman

My name is Alaina and I am a student at Stevenson University majoring in fashion merchandising. I am living at home with my parents, Kelly and Vince, my sister, Alicia, our dog, Lucy, and our cat, Cici. We live in an older, suburban neighborhood in Baltimore county, nothing too fancy. In the evenings, I work at Macy’s as a sales associate. This is the first time I am attending school while working, so I am learning how to manage my time more efficiently. There was research done at New Georgetown University in 2015 that showed seventy percent of students nationwide worked while in school. This makes me feel more hopeful that it can be done. The reason I have made it this far in my educational career, started a long time ago when I was learning to read and write.

My parents when they were younger.

Both of my parents had the biggest impact on teaching me how to read and how to write. My dad has dark brown hair, hazel eyes, and he wears glasses. My mom has lighter brown hair, like mine, hazel eyes and she also wears glasses. They both are very literate and it was important for them to share that same love for reading with me. I asked my mom if there was any specific tool or device that really assisted me learn to read and she said when I was in pre-school and kindergarten, she would use these small flashcards with colorful pictures on them to teach me. For instance, a flashcard would have a picture of a red apple on it and typed on the bottom would say “apple”. I was a visual learner, so the word and picture combination helped me remember the object and what it was called. My mom and dad would go through the flashcards with me whenever there was downtime like after they got off work or on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Wondering Bug Mascot by Hongkiat, Aug 16, 2013

The second most important way I learned to read was through books themselves, a great step up from single-worded flashcards. My parents said they would read to me usually before bed when I was about three years old. My dad told me that I always had to pick a book that rhymed and was humorous. My favorite books were, There Was a Cold Lady Who Swallowed Some Snow, and, There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, both by Lucille Colandro. They were both hardcover, very colorful, and came with a plush doll of the main character, the old lady. Basically, in both books, this elderly woman with a grey bun in her hair inhales these things and nobody knows why. In There Was a Cold Lady Who Swallowed Some Snow, the grey-haired lady ingests the proper tools to build a snowman. First, she swallows some snow, then a pipe, some coal, a hat, a stick, and finally a scarf. The end result is that she hiccups and everything flies out and lands perfectly as a snowman. In the other book, There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, she ends up having to keep ingesting critters so that they will catch one another. She gets a spider to catch the fly, a bird to catch the spider and this keeps escalating until eventually she has to swallow a cow. My parents said they enjoyed reading these two books to me and that I savored the ludicrous stories and the rhyming words. I would recognize words I had seen on the flashcards and seeing how they were put together, forming sentences, was extremely helpful on my journey to learning to read.

The last technique that helped me learn to read and to write was television. I remember sitting on the green carpet of the living room floor at home waiting for my favorite shows on our old box television set. My mom told me that when I was younger I was really into Dora the Explorer. Dora the Explorer is a cartoon about a little girl with brown hair who ventures out on missions with help from her monkey friend, Boots. She also has other animated friends that assist her on her adventures such as, Map and Backpack. Throughout the series she taught me a ton of vocabulary in English and Spanish. This strengthened the words I already knew and showed me how to use them differently. The show also used music and math to keep my interest and make learning fun.

I believe these devices I used prepared me for where I am now. Many of the above techniques I used, I still use today. I continue to read all kinds of books, watch documentaries, and use flashcards to study vocabulary words. My college studies about the fashion industry have already brought me new experiences. I am going to be taking a business writing course and I am reading a History of Costume textbook which comes with many new terms. My foundation of literacy skills continues to improve every day.