My Literacy Journey

Literacy Background

Throughout my life I wasn’t able to appreciate reading or writing because I find it to be a common tool to get through everyday life. Which is the main reason as to why I’ve never given myself the free time to enjoy literacy. Typing this short essay made me aware about my literacy background. To start off, I was helped by a lot of people both inside and outside of school in order to help me learn to read and write because I was low functioned as a youngster, meaning that I wasn’t up to speed with learning new materials. As a kid I didn’t have much inspiration from anyone to read, as I was mainly interested in seeing something visual. Until my family supported me of hearing my interest, they started to get me picture books. My earliest experiences with literacy was listening to children books such as ‘When a mouse eats a cookie’ or ‘Peter Rabbit’. Listening to the words in a calm and friendly voice has gotten me intrigued and more involved into reading. How I developed into literacy is looking at children books that shows both words and images at the same time. From there I was eager to look for books at the library and just stare at it for a while, learning new words until it was time to leave.

I actually remembered the moment when I begin to feel literate. This all begin at the library where I discovered a series of books called “goosebumps”.  Although the novel didn't have any pictures, I was fascinated by the description of the story which made me afraid of reading at night. From there I expanded my taste to reading horror and mystery books while I discussed mainly toward children's books that I saw on television as a little kid. One of the main activities I remember participating as a little kid was the 100 book challenge. The purpose of this activity was to make reading more entertaining and fun to learn. However I saw it as a contest, It made me read the book super fast and keeping me distracted from doing any classwork at school. What frustrated me about reading is that I was unable to recap what the book was about and I end up telling the teacher random stuff. The reason I rushed everything is because students who have read a certain amount of books goes on a field trip to the zoo, I managed to did enough to go on the field trip, even though I somewhat cheated. That activity benefited me in keeping myself occupied in reading. My biggest role model for reading was definitely R.L Stine, his books inspired me to get into the horror and mystery genre that I love today, he’s the person I wanna thank for taking me on that path.

Fast Forward today there’s a tremendous difference about my feelings toward literacy. I always thought to myself that reading would require pictures and words to have an amusing comfort. As it turns out that a good story, setting, and character development can create an amusing novel that can grab readers attention until the very end. I’m planning to use literacy by recording every dream I have into my dream journal. Whenever I remember a dream that keeps me interested or not, I recorded it into my own perspective in my dream journal which excites me since i’m mainly unpredictable and have no control over my dreams. This helps me indicate what i'm trying to say or do in my dream that’ll reflect in my personal life. Currently what’s inspiring me to continue reading is mainly graphic and great cliffhanger novels. A novel i’ve read two semesters ago called “Battle Royale” have got me so addicted that i’ve end up reading the entire novel in a matter of a week because of the suspense of who’s going to die next or in the chapter grabbed my attention in reading one more chapter. Without me being literate today I would’ve missed out on a lot of aspects that makes me for who I am.