"My Personal Journey To Literacy" Survival Spanish by Icornology
Assignment for Reading Methods
UCLA Teacher Credential Program
Assignment for Reading Methods
UCLA Teacher Credential Program
July 2010
I am always amazed that so many people are able to remember their early childhoods so vividly. For me, I have only a relatively small number of memories of my life before I was around 9 years old, and depend on photographs to be sure in my mind that I was really there. I’m jealous of people who remember more. Maybe I should go under regression hypnotherapy to recapture my childhood :>)
Since I don’t remember my early childhood, I honestly don’t recall how I learned to read. I have a few memories of teaching my younger brother how to add, subtract and multiply when I was 7 or 8 and he was 4 or 5. I also have a vague memory of tracing the outline of letters in a workbook when I was 5 or 6. I don’t remember having mentors helping me learn to read. Perhaps my mother and teachers helped me.
What I do remember is that by around 9, I rarely read storybooks but loved reference books, often very advanced ones. I really loved learning about dinosaurs, human anatomy, and machines. Any development in my reading abilities likely came through this passion.
The first novel I remember reading and being fully engrossed in was Watership Down when I was in 6th grade. This left a big impression on me. But I must have comprehended novels and been writing quite well before that. I turned in a book report on a novel when I was in 8th grade, and got an “F” for plagiarizing. The teacher figured that I had simply copied a professional review of the book. Believing me, my mother took this up with the teacher, challenging her to find the review that I had supposedly copied this from. Of course, she couldn’t and I ended up getting my first “A” on anything that I can remember.
While it seems clear to me that many kids learn to read in early elementary school through lessons designed specifically for this purpose, other kids require additional motivation that a typical reading lesson might not provide. For these kids, its important to find out what they are passionate about, and they will use reading as a way to engage themselves in these interests. By doing this, their reading skills with improve naturally, though probably not quite up to the levels of their classmates.
Comments
Post a Comment