Literacy is the knowledge of reading and writing. We use literacy on a regular basis in school with doing work, driving and reading street signs, and when cooking to read or write down ingredients. I used to absolutely HATE reading. It was the one thing I NEVER wanted to do. I would try to read but could never get interested in a good book. I later found that all I needed was to find the right kind of book.
My I was not influenced to read actual books at a young age or words on a piece of paper. I was influenced to read pictures and sounds recognizing what words sound like and what they mean. I don’t remember my very first experience with reading. However I would watch TV a lot as a child and if I heard a word I was not familiar with I would ask my family what it meant. I guess you could call it imaginary reading. I remember my grandma would swing me on the swing on her front porch and sing rock-a-by baby to me. It was my favorite nursery rhyme/song. I would imagine the pictures of the rhyme in my head and see the story so I could link words to pictures of what they meant.
I attended Lenna Conrow Elementary School. I was still not interested in books at that age and did not read. I would be assigned something to read for class and I would just struggle so much with it that I didn’t want to read. We had a program called Success for All (SFA) and for the first few years they taught us to spell and read by just sounding out the words which lead to me struggling in reading and writing in the future. I cannot remember any teacher from elementary school or anything else about it. I just remember hating to read.
I attended Mary Ethel Costello Middle School. That was when I started to become interested in reading. It was fourth grade and I was introduced to The Magic Tree House series. It was about magic and mystery and it caught my attention. There weren’t too many dull moments in the books. It felt, at times, as though I was being sucked into the magical world. I read every book in the series until they made the last book at the time, Christmas in Camelot.
Now I am in high school. I have read the Twilight Series, the Harry Potter Series, the Night World Series, and many other books. Reading has become a great part of my everyday life as a high schooler. I need to read and write to drive, I need to read and write to apply for college, I need to read to get ready every morning before school. I consider myself a more literate person then I was but I believe with age and knowledge I will become more literate.
Currently I love reading. I am in the middle of the 7th book in a series called The House of Night and I still feel as though I am being pulled into the story of every book I read or as though I am watching a movie of it in my head. Literacy is important now in my life because I wouldn’t have gotten to where I am now without it and I am continuing to learn about how it can be used. Literacy is like a tree; when you are young you don’t have many leaves of information but as you grow and blossom, your knowledge grows into many, many, many leaves of knowledge and it never stops.
