Literacy Autobiography

 Tyler Lovallo

                                   Think about your earliest experience of becoming literate.  Someone that has helped me with this growing up was my father.  He helped me with many things that helped me become literate when growing up.  He inspired me to become a hard worker and to always try to do your best no matter what.  He was also a great supporter as well.  Every time I had a sports game he would go out of his way to make it to one of my games.  Then whenever I had practice he made sure I was there 15 minutes early all the time to prove to the coaches that I wanted to play.  I was actually encouraged by my father because he always wanted me to be the best and outwork everyone else around me.  It definitely was a good mindset to have when I was younger because it helped me out in the long run.  Then I have had some early experiences with literacy as well.  One of them is he taught me how to read when I was about 4 years old. This was a big thing because it is one of the main things that you need to know in life and at a young age it is very helpful.  He also showed me how to write as well.  He would have a board of the alphabet and I would have to write out each letter 10 times in a row to perfect it.  I did this about 2 times a week.  It was so annoying as a little kid to be doing that, but it definitely was a for a good reason and it helped a lot.  I think the one that impacted me the most was reading.  I chose this because you read everything in the world including signs, papers, and documents.  This is big because that is basically how you function everyday.  I would practice reading and writing a little bit in school with my teachers when they were introducing it to me and then when I got home my dad would have practices for me.  I began to feel fully literate by the age of 9 I would say.  I feel like that was the age where I was able to do anything and be efficient at it learning wise.  Some other practices I did was read a little kids book such as Dr. Seuss before bed every night.  This was good practice to understand the words and practice reading.  Then another one I did was writing in cursive a little bit.  This used to be hard for me because I would have to keep the pencil on the paper the whole time and I used to always lift it up after each letter or word.  I would have a book showing me how to write the letters and would trace over it to understand how to do it.  I think the cursive frustrated me because of the way the letters are written.  All of the loops and little curves that had to be done and the way you had to link them all together in the words was annoying to me as a little kid.  My role model was definitely my father because he was always the one instructing me and leading by example especially doing it all by himself without my mother around.  Today I feel that literacy is very important.  It is important because it is the few beginning steps of what is being done on a day to day basis without realizing how hard it can be if you didn't know how to do it.  For example, if someone hands you a paper you read it without struggling and you write your name on it without struggling or thinking about it.  It is just a natural thing at this point.  These are just common things that I do today that are practices of literacy.  Sometimes I will read a book as well to expand knowledge on other words.  What continues to inspire me nowadays is other people around me and how they use certain words or the way they do things that'll intrigue me.