Jessick 1 David Jessick Mrs. Raymond UWRT 1103-E01 1 September 2015 Becoming Literate Growing up I was fortunate enough to have my mom stay home with me and my sister and help lay the building blocks of my reading and writing abilities. My mom had been a high school English teacher before I was born and since she had a strong background in higher level, reading and writing skills, she was able to help me greatly with my literacy ability. Another advantage I had was the three years ofiPreschool education that gave me the foundation of letters, sounds, and early reading ability. Throughout my childhood, I had a variety great sources that helped to®uild my literacy ability. Starting very early in my childhood, my mom was very important to my literacy narrative ‘ause she was always reading to me or helping me with the basics of writing. I can remember from an early age, my mom would read from the Disney Babies books. These books were a series that focused on either basic words or shapes and numbers. One source of difficulty that I experienced in preschool and kindergarten was my handwriting. I have always had poor handwriting but when I was younger this constantly discouraged me from writing because it was so bad. With practice and patience, I was able to improve my handwriting and I learned to enjoy writing. Every year my elementary school would host an annual Book Fair. At the Book Fair every year my mom would come with me and we would look through all the different booksJessick 2 available; afterwards I would select a couple of books and my mom would always ask “Are these books that you are going to actually read?” At these events, I would find myself often looking at the higher level reading books because they were normally about the subject matter that most interested me. Since I would pick these more difficult books, I would often find myself struggling to get through the books but once I was able to finish them with determination and focus I would always feel a great sense of accomplishment. ame Having a sister who was three years older than me was both good and bad in many different ways. I was fortunate to have her because she was able to help me in many different ways throughout my childhood regarding my literacy ability. Growing up we had a LeapFrog device and this was source of a large amount of learning as well as fighting between us. This device was a great asset because using it improved my spelling by playing a game where it would say a word and you would have to hit the letters on a little alphabet that was on a card. “The LeapFrog also helped my reading by having the device read along with me and I would have to keep up with the reading by tapping each word that was read. These activities were much more than games and they made me a stronger reader over time. ‘Throughout my childhood there were many different places and people that influenced my reading and writing, Whether it was my mom sitting down to read many different books to me or my older sister wanting to teach me as well as show off her skills, I had many different helping hands that each enabled me to become the reader and writer that I am today.