The gaining of literacy is the most important part of a child’s development. With the coming of literacy the world opens up to the child. My journey was in two parts.

When I was very young my mother would read to me in the bathtub. I loved the stories she read to me, letting myself be swept away to the lands that were presented in these books. The first books I remember having read to me were the Redwall books. These books were about the adventures of walking, talking animals who killed each other and ate a lot. At the time, I was captivated by these stories. However these books were not the ones that would eventually have the most impact on my reading. In first grade I started to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone with my mom. This book opened my imagination to a world of magic and mystery in a way that nothing else had, and I wished it was real as I hadn’t with anything else (I was very disappointed on my eleventh birthday when I did not receive an owl with an invitation to Hogwarts). The Harry Potter books continued to cast their spell over me until the seventh book was released in 2007. The first books of the series helped me become fluent in the decoding and inscription of the hieroglyphs of the English languages. Both of these book series assisted in my journey to literacy.

The other part of my transition to literary sentience was the influence of my early teachers. In kindergarten I had a teacher who, to preserve anonymity, I shall call Ms. X. I hated Ms. X. I had troubles completing the exercises in writing that she set, and because I took longer than everyone else to finish them, she made me work on them into free time. As a five-year-old, this was quite emotionally scarring, slightly ridiculous though it may sound. I hated anything to do with the cursed letters she made me laboriously form, time after time, she refused to even listen, I wouldn’t mind, if I knew what I was missing. I found out precisely what it was that I was missing the next year. My teacher that year will be called Ms. N for the purposes of this blog. She was much younger than Ms. X, and much nicer too. She focused more on the reading portion of literacy, making me appreciate the value in the laborious formation of letters. Ms. N helped me understand the beauty and magic behind the etching of the alphabet, and the stories and history that would be unknown without them. Her teaching techniques were much more child-friendly than Ms. O’s house of horror classroom style. I actually went from being one of the worst readers in my grade to reading far above grade level in one year. Both of these teachers contributed in their own vastly different ways to my journey to literacy.

            Every literate child became literate in a different way. My journey began in the bathtub with my mother reading to me. The Harry Potter books were an essential aspect of this step in my journey. My kindergarten and first grade teachers were both imperative in the formation of my attitude towards literature, although fortunately first grade had a much greater effect. Altogether, my journey to literacy was not worthy of a page and a half of written material.