As a child I hardly knew how much my mother, a school secretary, and grandmother, a preschool teacher, were doing to prepare me for reading and writing success. As young as one year old, I was given crayons to scribble as I pleased and other times to use with guidance. They would take my hand to help me make cards and notes for my loved ones. At such a young age I was literally chewing my way through board books while exploring pictures and textures whilst listening to my mother read and watching her turn the pages. According to her, it wasn’t long before I was the one turning the pages. All of my early memories involve sitting in the laps of my family members listening to them read stories to me. When I called Gran and told her about
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I had to leave everything behind and move away from all of my friends and my grandmother. It was traumatic and devastating. I spent a lot of that summer writing in my journal about missing my home, friends, and family. Then I started sixth grade at my new school and it was terrible. I was leaps and bounds ahead of the other kids in my class. Some of them could hardly read and I was flying through chapter books. I got so bored with reading and writing because the teachers were unable to challenge me and were not encouraging or inspiring. So I continued to read and write on my own for pleasure but without the support from school my enthusiasm began to fade. By the time I completed jr. high school I hated reading and writing. It was dreadful, there was nothing fun about it. All the teachers picked classic literature with strange words that I didn’t know. They pushed me to analyze text that I couldn’t understand and the only writing I was asked to do was factual writing or essays. I began to loathe everything about English class. I even stopped reading for pleasure. The assignments I had to do for school sucked the life out of my reading habits and created a teenager with a bad attitude about books and school. This pattern continued in high school with book after book that I didn’t want to read and paper after paper that I didn’t want to write. My creativity and love of reading and writing was officially dead, rest in peace literacy engagement! College didn’t help matters much it actually made it worse. I could hardly hold my eyes open when I had to read and you could forget about me picking up a book to read by
I had to leave everything behind and move away from all of my friends and my grandmother. It was traumatic and devastating. I spent a lot of that summer writing in my journal about missing my home, friends, and family. Then I started sixth grade at my new school and it was terrible. I was leaps and bounds ahead of the other kids in my class. Some of them could hardly read and I was flying through chapter books. I got so bored with reading and writing because the teachers were unable to challenge me and were not encouraging or inspiring. So I continued to read and write on my own for pleasure but without the support from school my enthusiasm began to fade. By the time I completed jr. high school I hated reading and writing. It was dreadful, there was nothing fun about it. All the teachers picked classic literature with strange words that I didn’t know. They pushed me to analyze text that I couldn’t understand and the only writing I was asked to do was factual writing or essays. I began to loathe everything about English class. I even stopped reading for pleasure. The assignments I had to do for school sucked the life out of my reading habits and created a teenager with a bad attitude about books and school. This pattern continued in high school with book after book that I didn’t want to read and paper after paper that I didn’t want to write. My creativity and love of reading and writing was officially dead, rest in peace literacy engagement! College didn’t help matters much it actually made it worse. I could hardly hold my eyes open when I had to read and you could forget about me picking up a book to read by