Literacy Narrative

The Beginning

4K-5K

1. I want to start my literacy journey from the very beginning where I first started to learn about writing and reading. It was during preschool when I first learned how to properly pronounce the letters in the alphabet. I always struggled with pronouncing the silent letters, and still to this day I struggle with catching silent letters unless I know the word already but new words with silent letters will still catch me off guard. Of course, our preschool teachers wanted to promote creativity and thus I attached to kids books early on because they were simple but most importantly to me it helped me wonder about things which got me to think about different ways I can create my own worlds.

01

Favorite Books

Magic Tree House

Around the time I was in the 2nd and 3rd grade I had hobby of reading my favorite book collection. The Magic Tree series has been by far the best books I’ve read. At this point in my life I was already bored with writing or reading if didn’t exist me, I had no motivation to write unless it was writing about non-fiction stories about whatever was in my mind at the time most times it was medieval things because at the time, I also was playing a very legendary called RuneScape. However, I loved reading the magic tree house series because every book in the series would take the main characters on different and crazy adventures. I also loved that there was always a new villain or protagonist that the characters would evade or a plot twist would occur and the real message of the book would get reviled.

02

Special Person

My Mom

Before continuing with this narrative journey, I need to talk about the most important person that helped me through my entire life of literacy. My mom has been hands down the most helpful and still is. I can remember the countless nights she would help me study how to spell and read. She would go out of her way to make sure if I needed to have something for school done, she would go as far as too read to it me while I took the information in or sit there and work with me to succeed in correct spelling, grammar, etc. no one else has put the time and effort into helping me with my literacy than my mom has. I this speaks volume for parent’s in general because without their support early we all wouldn’t have as much experience as we would normal on our own.

03

Start of my Struggles

Now that you know who helped me with my literacy struggles, I want to explain more about what areas I struggled in the further on in my life around middle school and high school. In middle school we started to get into public speaking, also this was the start of learning a 2nd language, and lastly, we started to get into readings that we would have writing projects about. All three of those where my top struggles though my middle school and high school time. I’ll talk about learning new languages, and public speaking and how it helped me better myself later on in this narrative. For now, I want to touch on my struggle to get to that next level of professional writing. During high school we would read challenging books like “to kill a mocking bird” or an easier one like “of mice and men” and then write narratives on the stories of those books. I can always remember the main issue my teachers had and is still an issue today. I would never give enough details when trying to explain something or I never would go into detail about a character or plot, instead I would give a quick response that always had very few details and never could fully answer the teacher’s questions or writing prompts.

04

ASL- Sign language

Moving on to the 2 main struggles I’ve had in my life, new languages and public speaking. I ended up learning Sign language during college. This was a new take on English because sentence structure is completely different because when you sign with your hands sometimes you find yourself confused because not every word in English is the same in ASL. Also, for example instead of normally saying Jon is wearing a red shirt today, its actually in ASL Jon wore red shirt today. So, it gave me a better understanding that there are all kinds of forms of communication and not one way is right or wrong.

06

Public Speaking

Fear of others

6. The last struggle I had, and I think a lot of people are in the same boat as me with public speaking. I do not think public speaking is hard for most people, but it is the fear of public speaking. I feel like before I took public speaking in college, I was worried about how others would think while I was speaking. The class helped greatly increase my ability to communicate with others through the various team building exercises, which helped build up my confidence level, so I did not have a fear of talking. I believe we learned that the reason why so many of us are afraid of public talking is because where afraid that we can’t communicate what we want to in a way that makes sense for the listener and that makes it uncomfortable. Through public speaking I realized also that verbal communication is such an important form of literacy because if we cannot verbally communicate with one another, how are we supposed to learn from each other? I also believe now that if we focused on the information and not what someone might judge us for, we could learn so much more from one another.

06

Final Notes

Conclusion

My literacy journey has been a long one so far and will continue to grow as I grow older too. I believe that the struggles in our life's help us improve our understanding of a certain topics or things and we are never truly done learning new things.