Literacy: Then and Now

     Ever since I can remember reading was always difficult for me. But even though school was a struggle for me, I always knew I wanted to be a teacher. I can vividly remember during my elementary years, always being one of  last one done with my classroom reading assignments. This was sometimes discouraging and was something I needed to over come. It wasn't until much later in my life when I started to begin to enjoy reading for pleasure. It wasn't until I started my journey to finish my degree online when I realized that I liked to read. It was never that I didn't like to read, but my comprehension of what I was reading was an obstacle. Even today, I have difficulty comprehending what I read, but now that I am older and have life experience under my belt, I don't get discouraged and more, I just take it slower until I understand what it is I am supposed to be reading.
    As I look through my elementary school years, I have to say there really wasn't anyone who had an influence on my reading habits. Back when I was growing up, labels like ADD or ADHD didn't exist and if you had some kind of reading deficiency they didn't really detect it unless your parents pushed for it to be found. With that being said, my mother today is 88 years old and had my brother and I when she was 40. She went to school until the 8th grade and then she had to drop out of school and stay home and help raise her family because her mother died at a young age. My father went to high school and that was it. He was in WWII and then proceeded  to work for a company who constructed airplane equipment. My parents were simple people and had the opportunity to give me a good life, but they were not going to take the extra time to find out whether or not I had a learning disability. It was just the way it was and I am ok with that. For me, I had to figure out how important reading and writing was before I could get better at it. If you ask me today, I would say I am an average reader with average comprehension and writing skills, but what I do have going for myself is my life experiences. With these life experiences comes the maturity a person needs to know to get them to reach their goals.
     Learning to read was very different then the way I am teaching reading today to my preschoolers. The way I was taught how to read was by learning name of  letters and the letter sounds. When you we were done learning letters and letter sounds, the teachers  would then have you  put them together to make words. In my preschool room that I am teaching in today,  we use the curriculum "Tools of the Mind" which is based on Vygotsky beliefs that "just as physical tools extend our physical abilities, mental tools extend our mental abilities, enabling us to solve problems and create solutions in the modern world. When applied to children, this means that to successfully function in school and beyond, children need to learn more than a set of facts and skills. They need to master a set of mental tools—tools of the mind" (Tools of the Mind Website: History). I sometimes wished I was taught under this curriculum because it teaches the students how to read and comprehend using hands on activities to engage them. It's not just sitting down at a desk and learning, but rather the teacher getting the students up and jumping around and learning as they play.
     Even though learning was a struggle for me growing up,  it has not deterred me from doing what I wanted to do and that was to become a teacher. I enjoy going to work every day and I tell people who ask me how work was today,  is that I have the best job in the whole entire world.