The Roller-Coaster Of Literacy

Submitted By lalavied
Words: 1088
Pages: 5

The Roller-Coaster of Literacy
Literacy has been an essential part of my life since I was a young girl. I have had enjoyable, difficult, and even miserable occurrences with reading and writing. Yet, whether it was talking to my brothers as a baby, reading a novel, or writing a critical essay, literacy has and will forever impact my life. In the beginning, it was a challenge to say the least, but as time moved on and I matured, my reading and writing did as well. Literacy is not only a necessity to me; rather, it has also become an enjoyable hobby.
In my opinion, literacy not only involves having the skills of reading and writing, but also acquiring the ability to communicate. This knowledge first began in my life when I was just a toddler learning to speak my first words. As time went on my communication skills developed, and I was prospering. My older brother on the other hand was not communicating at the same rate. My parents began to feel impressed with me, yet concerned about my older brother, Pokey. Literacy first impacted Pokey’s and my life when I not only spoke before my older brother, but also started teaching him to communicate. Hence, at some points I would speak for him. Literacy helped bring my brother and I into the speaking world and assisted us in growing closer together. I learned the complex language we now speak fluently and eventually began to love it.
Kindergarten was my first difficult year with literacy, but naturally, I did not know it then. It was actually wonderful to walk into a classroom filled with shiny posters of letters and pictures of animals on the walls, the smell of a cinnamon candle burning, and my red headed, all-smiles teacher Mrs. Deshotells. Yet, when the work began, the complicated mazes formally known as words filled my brain with dread and misery. I was always the first to fall asleep and the last to wake up at naptime, perhaps because my brain was exhausted from the constant strain of learning to read and write my name. My mom can recall that I would come home on regular occasions crying because I hated school. I really did think I had it tough my kindergarten year, and I surely was not aware of what was to come in my future grades.
By the end of first grade, my utter disgust for reading and writing was yet still alive inside of me. On the first day of second grade, I vented my thoughts and complaints thoroughly to my new teacher. She understood my worries and articulated to me that they would eventually diminish. Mrs. Ficaro is the one teacher that I will never forget throughout my academic career. Although second grade was one of my hardest years emotionally as a child, she was always there to cope with me about everything. She not only holds a safe place in my memory for her delicacy, she also was the first one that introduced me to writing stories. I owe my love for creative writing to this teacher. We were taught to keep a journal to practice our grammar and sentence writing, but on free time, we were always encouraged to use our imagination and create any entry we desired. This led to me filling every open line in that composition book with a new story. I produced fictitious fairy-tales, pirate adventures, personal accounts, and pretty much anything I could grasp into words. Stories would appeal to me as a child because they were my escape from difficulties surrounding me, and creating these tales was my escape from reality. Without Mrs. Ficaro and her introduction of creativity, I would not appreciate journalism and literature today.
Third grade began, and I was wholly confident in my writing skills. The only task I had to tackle was reading novels. Reading was a subject of neither interest nor disgust to me, but a program called Accelerated Reader changed my opinion on that. Accelerated Reader or A.R. points were given to students when they read and tested on a book. Every student had to pass the tests and get a certain amount of points to receive an A. For