The literacy narrative process was a fun and
interesting process. This assignment was
actually very fun to do. I learned a lot
about how I became a literate person today and I also got to reflect about all
of the work I did to get to be the literate person I am today. Throughout the
process, I began by thinking of the timeline of my literacy, then that timeline
was put into an essay format to illustrate the most important parts of my
literacy. After that, the final product
was an animoto slideshow video that used pictures and text to illustrate the
main points throughout my literacy life.
As I started my literacy timeline, the most logical
place for me to start was before I started preschool. I knew that when I was young, my parents
would always read to me and encourage me to learn new words and letters every
day. This was the most logical place for
me to start because I was very young and from there, I was going to go through
all of my years in school as to how I became literate. It wasn’t hard for me to remember how I began
to read and how my parents had helped me learn to read. On my timeline, I added a lot of details
because I did remember a lot about learning to read. Something interesting that I realized after
working on my timeline is how much my parents helped me learn to read. They would read to me every night before bed
and then make fun games out of reading and making words. I never realized how much this actually
helped my reading skills, but now looking at the whole process, I realize it
was very important for my parents to teach me how to read and to encourage me
to become a literate person. The main theme throughout my literacy timeline was
my ability to read and to recognize words.
Most of this dealt with books that were read to me or that I read as I got
older. For my literacy narrative, it was
very difficult to pick one specific event.
There were so many important events that happened in my life that
allowed me to become literate. I couldn’t pick just one event throughout my
life, so I decided to go with a theme for my literacy narrative. The theme that I chose to go with is how I learned
to read and I chose to explain that process of learning how to read throughout
stages in my life. Going with this theme
was an easy decision since I could include more than one event throughout my
life and it could really show the process of me learning how to read. The experience of creating a timeline really
helped me realize how much the people around me impacted my ability to become
literate. It allowed me to see that my
parents were the first ones to teach me how to read and because of them, I am a
literate person.
Before writing
the literacy narrative, I had to narrow my timeline to a few events that showed
my theme of learning how to read. I picked
four of the most important events from my timeline that I feel showed the most
about me learning how to read. From narrowing
my events from my timeline, I knew that I was going to write my story in sequential
order to show a progression of me learning how to read. My narrative read in chronological order from
the time I was young until last year in my senior year of high school. I used
an outline before I actually began writing my narrative to make sure that I was
going to include enough detail in my paper.
I chose an event from before I was in preschool, from second grade,
ninth grade, and then my senior year of high school. After choosing these events,
it was not hard to start writing my paper. I started writing exactly what I remembered
from a young age until just a year ago. When
I made the final edit for my paper, I was thinking about the important facts
that I wanted to include in my slideshow video.
I knew that there were key facts that I wanted to add to my video, so I had
to make sure to add those to my paper also.
Knowing that I was going to make a video slideshow, I made sure to add
key phrases and sentences that would stick out and that could stand alone in my
video to describe my process of learning to read. This only altered the way I would normally
write a paper because I had to be aware of sentences that I was using and I had
to add phrases that I wanted to use in my slide show video.
For my slideshow, my peer review partner chose a lot
of sentences in my paper that were very important to put in my slideshow. Out of all fifteen sentences my partner
chose, I used about nine of them. My partner
chose very good sentences to use, but nine of them really stood out as must use
sentences. For some of the slides, I did have a hard time explaining the event
in less than fifty-two characters. I think
that was the hardest part of making the slideshow. I wanted to use complete sentences form my
narrative, but unfortunately I could not.
It was hard to say what I wanted to say in very minimal words. My strategy was to formulate a sentence in my
head that I wanted to use and then find adjectives and other words that I could
use that were fewer letters and create a sentence out of those words. The images
that I used in my video were used as a complimentary tool to my text. Most of the pictures that I chose went after
the text slide to further show an example from the text slide and to further
elaborate on the text slide. Even though
my pictures were used as complimentary pictures to the text, they were also a
way for me to provide more information from the text slide. Since each text slide was only fifty-two
characters, it was important for me to use pictures that further described and
illustrated what I had said in the text slide before it. The images that I chose
were a mix of personal images and images from the web. I only used images from
the web when I could not find the perfect personal picture that would help
enhance the text slide. The personal photos that I chose helped tell the story
of my progression of reading. The first
picture I used was when I was a toddler and the last personal picture I used
was a picture of me reading to first grade students from when I volunteered in
a first grade classroom during my junior year of high school. The internet
pictures that I used helped to further tell the story and to give more detail
after my text slides. The song I chose was an instrumental version of the song
Concrete Angel by Martina McBride. I like this song because it has a good tone
and is very subtle. I wanted a song that
didn’t have lyrics because I wanted the text in my slideshow to represent the
lyrics of the song. Martina McBride usually sings about songs of growing up and
I thought it would be perfect to use one of her songs to show the progression
of how I learned how to read. This song helps communicate my literacy because
it is a slow paced song that is soft and helps the viewer read my text slides
in my video along with the music playing in the background. After watching my
video again, the only thing that I would change if I went back and could change
it would be to add more personal pictures of me growing up. I had personal pictures of me at a young age,
but after second grade I didn’t include very many other personal pictures. It was hard for me to look for these personal
pictures, so if I would have spent more time looking for pictures, I could have
possibly used a couple more pictures of me reading as I got older.
