I was never the outstanding reader of the class as a child but when you make it into a competition with a prize at the end who isn’t motivated to read? Grade school made reading fun and exciting and motivated you with competitions. When you move on to high school you see a giant decrease in that motivation as they pile the readings higher and restrict your reading choices to a slight list. As you progress to college there is absolutely no choice on readings and a very short time frame on when…
Literacy is more than a skill practiced and developed over-time. I believe that the art of writing is undoubtedly a rare passion that cannot be overlooked. When one has the gifted ability to give simple five-lettered words a more powerful meaning than their literal definition, they should consider themselves lucky. Not only does literature allow us the space necessary to grow alongside the millions of authors, but it also exposes us to the many different styles of writing. Through reading, we…
Delacorte Press, 2010. Summary: The main character in the book is Abilene Tucker, a girl who lived in 1936. Her father sent her to a small town called Manifest, Kansas while he worked a railroad job somewhere else. A pastor took her in, and in that house, she discovered a box of momentos and letters stashed away under a floorboard. After investigating the letters Abilene matched some of the stories that she heard from her father involving the characters Ned, Jinx and Miss Sadie. In the end, all…
equipped with a basketball hoop in the backyard and a minivan in the driveway. I grew up in a two-parent middle-class home with evenings spent at the dinner table waiting for Jeopardy to start; then, I would read my older brother’s comics or The Magic Tree House series until I couldn’t hold my eyes open. I was a tomboy for lack of a better word; a shy, reserved kid who had trouble expressing herself. As a result, my parents took my love of sports and enrolled me in as many leagues as possible.…
The Lord of the Rings is an epic trilogy that leads the viewer through mystical lands and intense gore filed battles. Lord of the Rings is a series of novels by J.R.R Tolkien that was made into three films and effectively created one of the most loyal fan bases. The Lord of the Rings is a movie franchise that has not only been shown throughout many age groups but also has made impacts on the film industry entirely. These films will go down in history as one of the greatest films of the 21st…
The day of the crash I was zipping up my duffel bag, when my dad yelled with his loud and very clear voice “It’s time to go.” I rushed downstairs with pillow, blanket, and all my bags in my hand and heard the car roaring in the driveway. Once I had thrown all of my bags in the back of the car I took my seat and buckled up, and off we went. It was a four hour ride, we were going to our cabin. I was eight and my sister was 5 years younger. My parents, my sister, and I were all stuffed into my…
beliefs developed, including superstitions about witches and witchcraft. Many Elizabethans believed that there was an invisible supernatural world that existed alongside the one they breath in and that the other worlds contained both good and black magic. Additionally, they believed that some humans had the ability to communicate with or control these spirits. They had this concept that all witches were old women who had the ability to summon evil spirits (demons) or Satan himself. A few…
books. In this stage of my education, I could read sentences somewhat smoothly. I was still sounding words out, but could manage to plow my way through a book. When I entered third grade, I read chapter books with Mr. Shae. We read the series The Magic Tree House. This is when I started having group discussions about what I read. This is when my literacy journey took another step as well. I truly started to understand my reading at this point. I was also…
outside the pages, the story of the bond between my mother and I. But I believe that after reading that book so much and spending so much time reading with her, it became easy. Reading was easy, I read books all the time. I mainly read The Magic Tree House series. I actually remember that in the second grade, I went to Lexington Elementary, my teacher had given me…
Series were, and will always be, my most read books. Back then it was just so easy rack up the points as I progressed through my favorite series at the time. So for two summers, since I wanted to make it only a summer reading program series, I worked through The Series of Unfortunate Events. I found it by wandering through the shelves looking for something to catch my eye and noticed…