Art1

Sitting on a colorful rug and listening to my pre-kindergarten teacher, who happened to be my aunt, read books from Dr. Seuss was first memory of learning to read. She would read word by word slowly and show us what she was reading and of course she would show off the pictures. She finished reading and now we are sitting at our tiny tables learning how to write alphabet and numbers. Those are the first memories I have of learning to read and write. Starting kindergarten I finally compose sentences though spelling was no my forte. Throughout elementary and middle school my writing improved because now I finally knew what the parts of speech were and the grammar rules that go along with writing. Grammar and parts of speech took a lot of practice and we reviewed almost every year. During those years I mainly learned the basics and the structure for writing. My experiences in high school are my most vivid of memories when it comes to reading, writing, and communicating. My freshman year of high school I had an English teacher that had a big personality and made English class interesting and often unpredictable. She would break out into a song or dance in order to explain things such as a hyperbole. She was the first teacher to peak my interest in reading and writing. Sophomore year was also a turning point for my writing because I had to write a lengthy research paper on Macbeth by William Shakespeare. I learned that I have trouble staying focused on my thesis at times and my wording can often be awkward. I was thankful that quite a bit of drafting was involved and my final paper was a huge improvement. Junior year was a great year for my interest in reading because I read East of Eden by John Steinbeck, which was a great book. Reading East of Eden made me realize how important annotating is and that rereading the text may be necessary if you did not pick up a good understanding the first time around. Senior year was an interesting one because of my expository reading and writing class. One of the hardest things I did was writing a group essay. We were in a group before we started the essay then when we started to draft we discovered we had different opinions on the topic. Communication was key and we had to figure out a compromise so that we could all get our point across. High school had a huge contribution to my literacy narrative. Over the years I have learned that I comprehend text well but have trouble staying focused and getting my point across clearly which are aspects that I would like to improve on. It is a goal of mine to improve my skills of focusing on the thesis and be state my thoughts clearly without beating around the bush and rambling on. I have come along way throughout the years but there is always room for improvement.