Literacy in My Life

My view of literacy was definitely impacted in kindergarten and early elementary school. In kindergarten was when teachers really try to get you to be familiar with the alphabet. I remember in kindergarten we would learn a different letter every day. We learned how it sounded along with some common easy words that started with that letter. The way we learned was every letter was a character, every time we learned a new letter we added that character in the room. When we were done learning the whole alphabet we had a party where we all had to dress up as one of the characters that represented a letter. Also, we all had to being in some kind of food that started with our letter. I was letter E and I remember I brought in some Keebler Elf shaped cookies. That is how I remember learning about reading and writing. Teachers always tried to think of some way to relate reading and writing to us, to make it seem like fun. I think teachers trying to make reading and writing seem like fun was very important because it helped to give me a positive view of what literacy is. If teachers just sat little kids down and forced then to learn about these letters and words without making it fun, the kids would be totally turned off and would never want to learn about reading and writing. In first in second grade I remember we always had reading time when the teacher would sit all the students in a circle to read to us. I think this also helped to give me a positive view towards literacy. Teachers always seemed to pick funny, suspenseful, or happy books to read us. This showed that reading could be fun too. Reading did not always have to be boring.
I think having those positive views towards reading early on in life was important. Everyone knows that when they learn to read that it is a skill that they will use for the rest of their life and continue to improve on as they get older. So getting a positive view about reading when I was really little made reading seem like not such a bad thing. So whenever I had to read, it was not going to be a big deal, it was just reading.
I think that as I have gotten older it has gotten harder to keep that positive of a view on reading. Now as a college student reading is a very big part of getting an education. Many times as a student you must read big amount of material that is not very interesting to some people. This is often difficult and frustrating. Things like this make me think of reading as boring sometimes. But at the same time, getting older and reading can be fun. Now that we have big vocabularies, we are able to read a much bigger variety of materials. So while reading can sometimes be difficult, it can also be very helpful, informative, or entertaining.