Monday, April 19, 2010

Learing to Write

I actually vividly remember learning to read and write when I was in elementary school. I used to get frustrated and embarrassed when we had our book groups (even though my mother was one of the volunteers) because my dyslexia worked so that it took me forever to decode words. I had to learn to read by site rather than decoding much faster than the rest of my peers. Beyond that, though, writing was quite fun for me. Before I knew script or letters, I would make-believe that I was a teacher, writing on a tiny chalkboard (scribbles), teaching my dolls. While in school, I remember having the hardest time with some letters – Y’s and K’s were always backwards, and I could never remember which side of the page to start with (dyslexia, again).

I remember the first long-story I wrote, though. In Mrs. Wernholm’s class in 4th grade, our assignment was to go through the writing process – come up with an idea about a story (our topic had to be animals and myths), write a rough draft, edit someone else’s paper, re-write our own, then draw pictures representing the story and bind the final product in book-form. My story was called, “How the Leopard Got Its Spots.” Something happened where paint got dumped on one leopard, and the rest of his friends wanted to be like him, too.

2 comments:

  1. I loved reading your blog today, it really was insightful and fun to read. I personally loved the part of playing teacher, haha look at you now! I think its interesting because I would venture a guess that most of can remember learning to read and write over math and that should serve as a reminder to make sure when we are teaching these, we do a great job!

    I was wondering though, were there things that your teacher did or could have that would have made things easier for you when you were learning?

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  2. I also did a similar activity like yours in acting like a teacher except I just pretended without any audience like your dolls. :) Moreover, the long process of completing a paper – first draft, peer edits, final draft, then presentation of our writing; is this really necessary? How did it help you? I remember how embarrassed I was to share my paper to a friend that was incomplete in which rough draft took more time in getting my errors corrected rather than developing creativity to my writing.

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