shitty 1st draft

Nicholas Kollert 
English 1510
“Shitty 1st draft”
October 1, 2012



Shitty 1st draft

Ever since I was a little child education has been a huge factor in my life and daily thinking. As far back as I can remember I’ve always been interested in some sort of activity that has enhanced my intellectual skills. Way back when I was a very youthful boy I can remember my mom coming into my room almost every night with some sort of brand new children’s book. Every night my mother would read me these children’s books until I would slowly drift off to a deep slumber, often times I wouldn’t stay awake long enough to even hear the ending of whatever story my mother decided to read me. This would often disappoint me because I never got to hear the ending of the story, but my mother would always say, “there’s always tonight to hear the ending” which was true and after the ending it would just be on to the next book. This was the first memory I can remember that has to deal with someone trying to enhance my literary abilities. Yet another incident that I can recall where someone has tried to help me enhance my literary skills is in kindergarten my teacher, Mrs. Cesil, would call us in everyday and make us sit down for what seemed like hours a write a journal entry just about what we as the students had done throughout the day. I felt like this helped a lot in how I actually understood readings, in the sense that I knew how to write something that made sense and you could actually read it. Yet another thing our school did in kindergarten was have a alphabet day where each student got assigned a letter in the alphabet and each student had to dress up as something that began with whatever letter they were assigned and the student also had to bring in a food dish that the letter began with. I felt this was a good tool to help kids learn the alphabet because the students would see the letters all day and they would make the connection with the letters and the food dish, and when food and kids get together they tend to hold on to what that food was like and what the name of the dish is. Yet another event I can remember that help me with learning how to read and spell properly is when I was in grade school the school bus would pick me up at my grandparents, because my mom would have to be into work at the early morning hours, and every week my mother would give my grandmother a copy of the spelling words that would be on the spelling test that week, and every morning my grandmother would accompany me at the school bus stop and she would give me a word from the list and I had to spell it correctly. Everyday my grandmother and me would try to set a new goal weather it was get the first ten words memorized or to get threw the list three times without making a mistake. I thought this helped me a lot because my grandmother made it her personal objective to make sure I knew all the words like it was the back of my own hand. I thought this was huge in developing my ability to spell because even though my grandmother’s method was rough and often times difficult but in the long run I believe it worked because I am almost positive I got an A or close to an A on every single spelling test for those six years that me and my grandmother practiced the bus stop spelling study program. Overall there were many things in my life growing up that greatly influenced my learning of literacy ability but the ones listed above stood out to me as the activities that I feel like I benefited from the most in learning how to write and rea