My Literacy History

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t read, but I’m fairly sure that there was a time when I was unable to comprehend what words where. When I was little, my parents would read me books and it got to the point where I would pick out the book and read it to them. My parents would be there, coaching me along, while I read about the adventures of Junie B. Jones or the horses in one of my numerous horse books.

I think my need to be the best at reading stems from when I was in first grade. I remember being at home and being told that I was an awesome reader. Since I did not know the reading capabilities of my peers and we only really read picture books in kindergarten, I thought that I was the Albert Einstein of reading when I entered first grade. I remember not being put into the top reading group in my class and being crushed. Early on I developed my competitive side, and quite honestly, I was pissed that I was not the best. The top group was reading Charlotte’s Web I believe and my group was reading a picture book about bats (the animal, not baseball). I began to detest my group for not being able to read at the level that I thought that I was capable of reading at and I strived to become the best. Eventually I became decent at reading comprehension and I was moved into the top reading group. I recently ran into my first grade teacher and she remembered how I was strong at reading and writing. I felt proud that my determination to be the best had paid off.

I was cleaning my room last summer and I decided to make room on my bookshelves. My room is set up so that one wall of my room is a bookshelf built into the wall. So as one can imagine, my bookshelves hold some pretty valuable space that I now need. I decided to put away my favorite childhood books and give some away. As I was going through my books, I felt nostalgic about my childhood and all of the fond memories that I had reading the books. Some books I had no recollection of reading, and I gave those away, but some books, I actually sat down and re-read, reminiscing about my childhood. However, I remember the books being more interesting then than they are to me now.

I was also looking for some wrapping paper one day in a closet in my house a few months ago and I found my old journals from elementary schools. Remember those journals that they gave to us that half of the page was room to draw, and the other half was for writing. But they only gave us like three lines to write on, so it only ended up only being one sentence because we didn’t understand handwriting size? Yeah. I found those journals.  They where actually quite amusing. They had drawings in them and lines underneath with every single word spelled incoherently saying “I like ponies.” Except the “k” was backwards and ponies was spelled “poneys.” You know, because I was 5 and had no grasp of the English language. I also found old father’s day and mother’s day cards that I had made when I was little. I realized that when I was little and I ran out of room writing across the page, I would continue writing down the side of the page until I finished saying what I had to say. Which is unfortunate because I would really like to know what “ASDFGHJKL” means.