My Literacy Development

What is literacy? Literacy is the ability to read and write. It is about a person’s ability to use these skills to shape their life. Being literate means to be able to write and read to talk effectively. Today being literate is to be able to write and read to be successful in the world. Literacy is vital to the advancement for people in their life. It also plays a huge part in the success in one's career endeavors. Years ago literacy just referred to the ability to write, read, and use the information.

In recent years the meaning of literacy has become much more than that. Now literacy includes things such as, numbers, images, and technology. Literacy can be something that developed through things like Books, the internet, television, family, and many other resources. In this literacy narrative I will discuss the origins of my current attitudes about writing, and reading.

The beginning of my literacy development started in my childhood home. A large off-white house with six bedrooms. This house is also the house that my

mother, aunt, and uncle grew up in. My immediate family, and I all lived in this house. In 2001, at the age of two in a half is when I started to acquire skills of literacy. Instead of going to preschool, like my older cousins were doing, my parents decided to home-school me. I was home-schooled until the age of five, and on my way to kindergarten. The basics of my early childhood literacy skills came from my family. My mother Shaquanda Crump, and my father Danyale Oliver were my teachers during this time.
We would sit in our back room at the long wooden table while she showed me flash cards. I remember one set of flashcards displaying the alphabet, with corresponding words and pictures on them. My mother would go over this with me repeatedly. I gradually moved on to writing things. I was given practiced handbooks and worksheets. I would sit on my parents bed and practice tracing and writing simple things. I started out writing and tracing the alphabet. My parent’s would make me do it back-to-back until I had a basic concept of how to do it. It was one of my least favorite things to do. Once I nailed the alphabet I moved on to writing and basic words like “cat”, “dog”, and “bat”. I also learned how to write my name before I entered kindergarten.
I don't dislike writing perse, but it is something that is my least favorite subject and thing to do. It’s not that I am bad at it, I just don’t enjoy it. Some aspects of writing more than others. In particular, creative writing would be one of those aspects. My dislike for writing developed between the seventh and eighth grade because of creative writing. The teacher I had during that time would do a lot of creative writing for our english lessons. This genre of writing is something that I am not good at, at all. I struggled with basic assignments like coming up with a five line stanza. In general I had a hard time coming up with things to write about, because I truly lack creativity in the writing department.
I love reading, in general. I have loved Books ever since I was younger, before I even started school. My great-grandmother would take my cousins and me on walks downtown to the public library to get Books. She was the first person to ever get my first library card. In the library I would roam the many aisles of children’s Books. I would be in search of the book that interested me the most. I vividly remember one book in particular that I credit to affecting my current attitude about reading. I was on an usual search for a book and something caught my eye, I thought it would be fun and interesting to read. Therefore I decided to take it home with me. The book was titled “The Rainbow Fish”.
I remember picking out this book only because of the cover, which displayed a sparkly, and glittery fish.

Once I took the book home, I began to really like it, and wanted to learn how to read it. My reading wasn't the best during these times. I would get my mom, dad, aunt, grandma, or just anyone who would agree to help me read it, or read it to me.

After a while I was able to read “The Rainbow Fish” on my own. Once I was able to do this, I was no longer interested in this book. I wanted to move on to something else, and this cycle continued. One simple book started my journey with Books, and reading in general. Something specifically about rainbow fish that affected my current attitude about reading is the challenge it gave me. I could not read very well, and Rainbow fish had what I thought were “big” words at the time in it. So I wanted to be able to read the big words in the book on my own. Instead having someone help me, or read it to

me.
Currently, today I still enjoy and love reading. I read Books, magazines, articles, poems etc. I just like to read things that I find interesting in general. It doesn't matter what the subject, or the topic is on. Usually, I do not like paperback books. So, instead of getting paperback books, I like to buy books from Amazon Books. I then read them on my Kindle device, or on my phone from the Kindle App. I typically like to read women's fiction books but, I am not subjected to only this type of genre. I could possibly read all day if I really wanted to. In some books I read I