Lauren Welch My literacy journey began at a very young age, even before I can remember.

It started when my dad used to read to me when I was probably 2 or 3. Hed sit me down on his lap in the big blue chair, or hed put his arm around me and read before he tucked me into bed under the pink gingham print covers. My favorite books were Peter Litmans Busy Trains and Cant You Sleep Little Bear? I had other favorites too, but those are the most memorable. I think I loved this reading time because it was a bit of a treat for me. I didnt see my dad that often, and my mom didnt read to me much. This was our quality time so I treasured it. As he read, Id follow along with him. I began to really get into reading when I started kindergarten. My teacher, Mrs. Goodnight, would introduce us to new friends, which were inflatable little people with letters on them. I can still remember the first letter I learned was m. After we learned a letter, Mrs. Goodnight would hang the inflatable person on a string in the classroom so we could all look at them. We learned how to use letters, what sounds they made, and what vowels were. Eventually, the class was introduced to all the letters. After I learned how letters came together to make words, and once I knew how to say those words by sounding them out, Mrs. Goodnight gave us little books to read. The first book I ever read on my own was a story about a girl who couldnt find her cat. The little girl looked everywhere for her cat, but she couldnt find it. I remember being frustrated. I wanted to find out what happened to the cat. At the end of the book, and it was a short book, maybe 10 pages long, the girl found her cat under her own bed, and it had kittens. I was so happy and somewhat shocked, because Id never seen the ending coming. Something I started doing about this age, after I learned to read, was to read the labels on food, like cereal boxes or peanut butter or whatever I could find. I had to have a lot of help at first, of course,

sounding out some of those weird preservatives, but I learned them eventually. One of them was corn syrup, and I began reading that on nearly every label. I actually became afraid of corn syrup because I found it in everything and made my mom promise whatever I was eating did not contain corn syrup (she lied). But I digress. At my elementary school they started a program called AR, which stood for Accelerated Reading. Students would check books out of the library, read them, and then take a small quiz on the book and receive points. Points were totaled up so students could reach higher levels in the program. Different books had different numbers of points on them. For example, my favorite series, The Bernstein Bears, were generally worth 2.5 points. Harry Potter books were worth almost 40. As prizes, the school gave away buttons with animals on them for different levels. I had to have all of those buttons. By the time I was in second grade I had completed the fourth installment of the Harry Potter series, The Goblet of Fire. Needless to say, I knew I was a badass with all my buttons. From that point on, I couldnt stop reading. The AR program eventually wasnt cool anymore, and I moved on to middle school, but I never stopped reading. Maybe it was because I knew something that other kids didnt realize: whatever you love, you can read about it. There are books for everything and every topic. I started to get into history when I was in about 7th grade. I found these books at my local library that were about the Tudor women like Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I, Mary Tudor, and Catherine of Aragon which were written like a diary. I absolutely loved them and I actually learned a lot. One morning in homeroom during 7th grade I was reminded there was a writing assignment due for our English class that day, so I quickly pulled out a piece of paper and scribbled down something I thought was somewhat presentable in a few minutes. The prompt was about our favorite pair of shoes. The shoes I chose to write about were not my shoes but my mothers, and apparently the paper was submitted to a local Food Lion writing contest and I ended up winning twenty five dollars for it. In this

way I think writing found me more than I found it. The silly contest gave me a bit of an ego boost, and I discovered I liked it because I was good at it. The more I read, the more I found it was easier to write. I especially love grammar, but thats another story. On the very first day of my 8th grade year, I walked into my English classroom like I owned the place. I was in for a harsh reality. Mrs. Witcher is one of the scariest people I have ever met. She is also one of my heroes. Mrs. Witcher is still one of the harshest graders I have ever known. Her tests were hard, the vocabulary was hard, and I quickly found myself struggling in her class. Her class helped me become a better writer because it challenged me. Throughout middle school I kept I diary. I wrote in this little book just about every day, about my day, and rereading what I wrote now, my subjects seem meaningless, but I really believe they helped me through my literacy journey. Even then, my writing was structured. Writing in the diary helped me become a better writer overall. It not only helped me get out my feelings but I became better at grammar and essay structure. I probably wasnt a normal kid but all of my spelling and grammar had to be correct, even in the writings no one but me would read. My freshman and sophomore years in high school sort of plateaued my literacy journey, like the way someones cardiac monitor goes flat when a persons heart stops beating. Those years my classes did not read anything I found particularly interesting or challenging, and the writing we did seemed too simple. My junior year breathed new life into my interest in reading and writing. Id been so bored by my previous years Id almost forgotten about it. My teachers name was Mrs. Kozak and she taught my honors English III class. Mrs. Kozak challenged our class to think deeper about what we read. She really helped me understand literary concepts, like symbolism, for example. Symbolism is a word that gets thrown around often in an English class. Its easy to define, but its not always that easy to pick out of text. Mrs. Kozak taught me how important, and how often, symbolism is in text. Reading took on a

whole new meaning for me and made it exciting again. I especially loved the books we read. I know most other kids couldnt stand Nathaniel Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter but I absolutely loved it. I loved F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby, Arthur Millers play The Crucible, and John Steinbecks Of Mice and Men. My senior year of high school, my writing was challenged. Not because I had a rough teacher, but because I could only write essays. I had spent 13 years of my life at a public school and none of my teachers had ever taught me how to free write. I could write a fantastic 5 paragraph argument essay with an introduction which stated my thesis, 3 paragraphs for each point I was going to make, and a conclusion where I restated my thesis. It is still a challenge for me today. Unless I am making an argument in a paper, Im stuck. I read different books my senior year as well, more European literature than classic American literature I read my junior year. Again, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Mary Shelleys Frankenstein and Jane Austens Pride and Prejudice. I even read Oscar Wildes The Picture of Dorian Gray on my own time. I consider it one of my favorite books of all time, and I think reading that helped my reading comprehension skills. Another one of my favorites was Grendel, a book written from the perspective of the antagonist of the old English epic Beowulf. This book was not only an interesting read, twisting my mind to comprehend the existentialist philosophies it advocated, but was also one of the hardest things Ive ever had to read due to its extensive vocabulary. Backtracking a few years, its worth noting that my stepmother is a huge fan of the game Scrabble. Of course, Scrabble is a game where you randomly draw letters from a bag and try to make words from the ones that you draw. This may not seem important, but my stepmom has an amazing vocabulary. She helped me expand my own with this game too. If I didnt know a word, she wouldnt

tell me, but shed make me look it up in the dictionary. We still play this game to this day and I still have to look up a word in the dictionary from time to time, too! My vocabulary expands every day. Talking to new people, reading new books, even textbooks, helps me learn new words. Writing so many essays, for this class, and all my others, helps me progress on my literacy path each and every day.