You Can Always Change

Some people were born to be literate, and some are not so fortunate to be gifted this valuable skill for life. Sadly enough I was not lucky enough to be someone who received this gift naturally. Even though I didn’t receive the skill of literacy naturally I worked my hardest to obtain this necessary skill. I can still remember where it all started, with my mother, and with the enormous purple and green dinosaur named Barney. She and I would sit and watch the Barney show every day. She would always sing along to the songs in the show, until I would feel comfortable singing them. Then I wouldn’t let her sing the songs so I could do them all by myself. That show did not interest me for very long though, because I had found a new passion and source of learning, Sesame Street. This was the most educational program of my early childhood career, teaching me everything from numbers, alphabet, to many other things. This is the single thing that jump started my spoken form of literacy, allowing it to blossom and grow, because the spoken form of literacy is the only form of literacy I truly enjoy. It interested me more than written literacy ever did, because it is what I felt I could truly express myself with. Once I started school, I remember the first three years being very packed with literary practice. Starting off on day one in kindergarten I remember my teacher giving us sheets with four lines on them. The first line had tracings of a lower case a, the second line was blank, the third line had tracings of an upper case a, and the final line was blank. The teacher told us to trace the letter on the first and third lines, then to practice on our own on the second and forth. This would become the routine every day for each individual letter in the alphabet until we could proficiently write our alphabet on our own. This would not only help us improve penmanship, but to also begin our written literacy careers. Then as I entered first grade, I was given a whole new form of literacy practice. First, I had to start reading small children’s stories to my mother two times a night and each time I did she would sign a sheet saying that I had done so. Not only did I have to read to her, when I would go to school I would also get one on one time with the classroom aid to help improve my skills as a reader. On top of all of that, I also had to now practice my spelling words. I had to write my spelling words five times each every night, possibly the single most dreaded thing I had ever had to do, but it was also the thing that my mother insisted for me to do the most. Then once I entered the second grade, I was bombarded with a whole new way to practice my literacy skills. First, instead of writing my spelling words five times each every night, I had to make sentences using my spelling words. This could be a very tricky thing if I didn’t know the definition, so it became a very multi-purpose tool for learning. Also in the second grade, I was introduced to a new world called AR. This is a program where a person will read a book then test over it to receive a certain amount of points, depending on how hard the book is and how well you do on the actual test. After you would obtain a certain amount of points, you would receive a prize. This is something that made me very motivated to read more and do well on those tests. All of these tools and programs set a great foundation for a good literary career, but then I entered middle school, the most unmotivated