Literacy Autobiography

My name is Kasheena Collins and I was born on the 27th of February, 1991 in Brooklyn New York. I was raised among an educational Trinidadian mother and had a very interesting and exciting early childhood of my experience of becoming literate.

As a single parent raising three kids, life was not always easy for my mother. Even though she struggled while taking care of her family she made sure that her kids were well educated. My mother helped me to understand reading and writing in ways that I could never forget. My earliest memory of my mother is when she taught me how to read and write by using phonics coding and singing the words out loud so that I could understand and get familiar with words and letters and how they should sound. I was always encouraged when she had me sing along to the sound of each letters and we would even play games to enhance my knowledge to visualize words as well; it was important to my mother that I be inspired to always use my imagination.

When I read in my earliest years of childhood, I never read silently. I used to always read out loud so that I could not only understand what I was reading but that I could also hear the sound and imagine the words as I read to myself. In school, when my teachers would assign the class to take home books to read, I always picked books with pictures so that I could have a visualization on what was going on in the book. I had a very broad imagination in my early years and that was my way of learning to read and write. I also would often find myself using what my mother taught me and applying her methods to helping my classmates when they were having difficulties with reading.

My days learning literacy skills started not only at home with my mother but also when I was in daycare and during my first years in grade school. I enjoyed when teachers read out loud to the class and I learned many different, enjoyable methods of reading and writing such as phonics coding, whole-word approach, language experience method, Orton-Gillingham, and so much more. Sometimes, words that frustrated me the most were longer words that took time to pronounce correctly. I would always find myself sticking to a shorter word that meant the same as the longer word so that it was more comfortable for me to use instead. When I had trouble with reading, I always found myself going back to what my mother had taught me. She was my role model and I could always count on her help when I was struggling with my reading and writing.

 Today as I advance my literacy skills, I learned to feel extremely comfortable to do silent reading more often, to read more advanced books that don’t contain pictures at all, and to be more detailed in my writings, and so much more. With advancing my literacy skills it helped me to understand the world around me and to be involve with enforcing my own opinions and thoughts out to the world. In my personal life, I use literacy in my everyday life; I use it in school on my assignments, to communicate with employees at work, with my friends as well with my family. Having so many people around me helps to continue to inspire my literacy development each and every day.