Personal Narrative: My Adventure With Literacy

In my opinion, literacy is the foundation of education. To be a reader or writer can encompass a broad definition. It can range in meaning to describe a child who is just learning the sounds letters make when joined together to form a word, to a description of a poet, music producer, and so on. My experience with reading and writing began with the love of my mother, and grew from my continual interest and fascination for greater knowledge.

I 've loved to read and write ever since I was taught my ABC 's for the first time. It 's been a huge part of my life in a lot of different aspects. I learned how to read when I was three years old because I went to a daycare where I was the youngest kid and the only one who couldn 't read. Reading and writing just stuck with me after that. After I started reading better than my older daycare-mates, school was ready for me to conquer. The school put me with older kids right away and I was in English class with 3rd graders when I was in kindergarten. It helped me out with making friends and I always got along with older kids better

I have memories of using literacy all the way back to when I was a toddler to now. Reading and writing always came easy to me as little kid from what I can remember. My earliest memories of reading would be from when I was very young, possibly still a toddler or a tad bit older. Every night before bed, my mom and I would sit in my bed, she would read to me. We read Bible stories from the children’s Bible, Goodnight Moon, Cat in the Hat and many other children’s books. That was my favorite part about bedtime when I was little. Although she was reading to me, and all I was doing was listening and wanting to look at the pictures, her reading to me every night was a huge influence for me and was what made me want to learn how to read. I would without

Since I was very young, I have had a strong passion and fascination with words, an interest that was especially encouraged by family and developed through a variety of mediums. Like most babies, my first word was rather simple: “Da-dee” (“Daddy”). When learning my alphabet and numbers, my mom would play popular kid shows of the time, including “Sesame Street” and “Arthur,” on television and on audio tapes in the car. In addition, I enjoyed singing along with various Disney tapes and childhood favorites, such as Barney, Raffi, and Peter, Paul, and Mary. “I suppose you could say I was the ‘gatekeeper of my children,’” Mom recollects. “Without a doubt, I preferred for them to listen to musical tapes that were both educational and fun and believe it or not, if we listened to a tape plenty of times, I would actually start to sing along, too!” she laughs. When I was able to start formulating short phrases and sentences,

In first grade, I had started reading, or that is what I recall as my first time. My stuttering problem was always there, but I was a “great reader” according to my teacher Ms. Brown. She was a kind elderly woman, who wanted to see everybody in her class succeed in reading a whole book. Then second grade came at the snap of a finger. There, I wrote my first paragraph full of “mumbo jumbo”. Even though I wrote my first paragraph in second grade, I did not learn about the writing process until high school. After I left high school, I learned that we had barely touched on the writing process due to a significant place in my life… College! In my first English class (Eng 180), my professor went over the ideas of rhetoric, the writing process, and discourse community. Since my old professor did not go in depth on these topics, meant that they were still fresh in my head with no place to stay. In English 280, we went into full detail on these topics and understood more about the meaning and purpose of them all. I know that the writing process includes brainstorming, researching, proofreading, revising, and etc.; however, I felt like I have been doing it all wrong for years. I have made many improvements to my writing due to English 280, but the skills that I improved in the most were researching and synthesizing.

English has never been my favorite class to take. I was more interested in math because there is one answer to a question and that is it. With English, everyone writes differently. Style is difficult to grade and there is not a yes or no answer to an essay.

My literacy journey had begun earlier than most kids, according to my mother. I started reading in kindergarten, with help with the BOB books and the PBS show Between the Lions. I don’t know when I had started writing exactly, but I remember clearly writing short stories about my cat Stormy in 3rd grade. At that time we had to write weekly short stories, and I only ever wrote about my cat. In 4th grade, I had started exploring writing more; I would write plays for me and my friends to practice during recess. Most of them, I’m happy to say, were actually educational, so my teacher had even let my friends and I perform one about early-American settlers in front of our whole class.

I believe that my literacy past has affected the reader and writer I am today. There is a lot I can talk about that has has an effect on me being the reader and writer I am today. One being the country and environment I lived in as a kid. In Gambia teachers don’t take reading seriously as they should. We as nursery students, focused more on learning how to spell and doing the math and also writing. We weren’t giving much books to read, maybe one or two books the whole semester. And because of that, I wasn’t a fond reader. Regardless of us not given books to read, we were giving many writing exercises so that really helped. My family however thought that reading is very important and because of that, they bought my siblings and I lots of book

Everything that we do requires words. Even when we think we create our memories out of words. One reason why we do not remember stuff when we are young is because we don’t have the words to put the information into to store it. Writing is very important because writing means everything, and if we didn 't have writing, we wouldn 't be able to spread ideas. The local and world news are in writing also so we need to be able to read the information. Also directions on how to use something or directions to go somewhere for transportation are also written in words. It is unimaginable how many roles writing plays in our lifestyles and we don’t even think about it.

A literacy narrative is quite often thought of as a personal account as to how the written word has affected one’s life. My literacy narrative, however, embodies my passion of art to define who I am and how it has determined who I have become. Photography has been a dominant part of my life since I was born; my mom loved to take pictures of me playing and she would get in pictures with me wherever we traveled. She would buy these cheap, disposable cameras in bulk and just let us kids play with them or she would take enough pictures of us that we felt like her little models. Sometimes, she would even develop the film she thought might be promising and add the photos to our baby albums she cherished so deeply. My mom was my budding inspiration for photography, and she is still my biggest supporter today. I have to thank the twenty-first

It’s crazy to think to myself that about this time last year I never would have thought I would be the person I am today. I have grown in many ways I thought were impossible, and gained experience that shaped me into who I am right now. One thing that stands out to me the most though, as I sit here in my dimly lighted room writing my literacy narrative, is that I have learned to not only enjoy fishing, but to love it. Being outdoors, hiking, fishing, etc., have never been something I have enjoyed, or ever been willing to learn. I always thought to myself, “why waste my time outside getting all sweaty when I could say inside with the AC and do my makeup?” but oh have things change, and ever since this summer, my love for fishing has grown into

This week, my literacy narrative actually wasn't that hard to write. Consider, that I recieve quite a few helps from peer review during class. I found the peer reviews to be really helpful. Although I don't really remember what we discussed in class. But having the peer review questions as a references was a really big help. Therefore, I understand what I needed to strengthen my paper on. So, during the writing process, I know what to focus on. Still, it was really difficult coming up with ways of how to connect the story together, making then flow nicely. Personally, I am well aware that the shift of my story is too fast, but I has no ideas of how to connect them together. Since, I hardly write in first person I kind of has no clude on how

It was once said that baseball is America’s greatest pastime. It dates all the way back to the 18th century, with a multitude of versions being played. Baseball is a game of intensity, athleticism, skill, and the mind. A lot of people have heard of baseball and have probably watched a game on TV, or at least part of a game. I however, would much rather be playing the game instead of watching it.

Throughout this entire year we have worked on improving each one of our literacy skills; reading, writing, listening, and speaking. The literacy skill I improved on most was my speaking skills. I think that speaking and creating a good speech involves all of the literacy skills we have learned. Throughout the year we practiced each one of these literacy skills. As we read various books and poetry pieces, we turned the knowledge we read about into an essay. I learned about the importance of reading and how it helps your writing. In class we used our academic placemats to analytically discuss certain topics. One part of this included using academic language to get our ideas across, the other part was listening to what our partner had to say.

I could have started volunteering with the intentions of doing just for the sake of giving back to the community I grew up in. Instead, I did it because I was forced to. I was forced into waking up every Saturday for an entire month before seven a.m. to be at the library with adults and a bunch of kids half my age. I could have sat there reading a book for school and minding my own business. Instead of being miserable my entire summer, I decided to try my hardest to help children to love reading as much as I do.