Adults around me would talk to me frequently. My father was a stickler about people talking to babies in a normal voice instead of with "baby talk." By having this kind of stimulation I began listening to the sounds of the words being spoken to me. As all babies do I tried imitating the sounds I heard. I began to "coo" and babble back to my parents and other adults. People would repeat the same word over and over to me. I soon began to catch on and said my first word. My first word was "da da." This was a big step in my literacy development as my first spoken word. My father also didn't like people to use nicknames such as "pumpkin" to refer to me so I quickly learned my name.

Skipping ahead a few years as my vocabulary grew I would try and say big words and they just didn't come out quite right. I would try to say asparagus and it would come out "bascarious." I also tried to say spaghetti and it came out "bascedy."

Along with all of the alphabet and color learning the daycare and my family read to me a bunch! The daycare teacher would have us all sit in a circle so we could see the pictures and would read stories to us. At home I would bring my mother book after book after book and we would sit there and read about ten to fifteen books per night. We read Little Golden books, Cifford, The Pokey Little Puppy series and Disney books. Some of my favorite books were The Pokey Little Puppy series. I would recite the books that were most often read to me as if I were reading them myself. The books that I didn't know the story to I would look at the pictures and "read" my own story to fit the pictures. I thought I was doing just what the grown ups were! I would get out the books that had a single picture and a word telling what that object was on each page and "read" them because I knew what each picture was, such as a chair or a book.

When I started school I was introduced to a new program, Book-It. In the Book-It program I had to read and meet requirements very similar to those in the library program. The difference was when I got done with the requirements in Book-It I got a free personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut. I continue participating in Book-It until the end of sixth grade.

f McLean County at age 2 1/2. They further helped in my quest to become literate. I began to learn the alphabet at daycare. My mother too worked with me at home to learn the alphabet. One day my mother and I were at the park. I was climbing the ladder up to the slide and she was climbing the ladder behind me. I began to recite the alphabet and went through the entire alphabet! My mother was astounded because she didn't even know that I knew the entire alphabet.

Once I started kindergarten I began learning with the letter people. We would watch videos with them featured in it and do worksheets to enforce each letter and the sound it made. My favorite letter person was Miss A, Ahcooo. This was of course because my first name begins with A. The letter people on the videos would put themselves together to show what sounds they made when combined. The words we began to form were one, two, and three letters long at this point. Some of the were: A, I, An, As, All, And, & The.

When I decided to go to Heartland I took the placement test and was placed in English 095. I felt we did more reading than writing in that class. Nevertheless, I completed it and now I am traveling down the road of English 101.

My mothe

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