Kevin Collins

UWRT 1104

Kevin Collins

Professor Raymond

8-30-17

Writing Prompts 1 Literacy Narrative

Learning to read and write is different for everybody. There are so many factors that

affect how you read and write. Some examples are: accessibility to technology, school, siblings,

location/community, and personal motivation. I was fortunate enough growing up to be provided

with various tools that all positively affected my literacy narrative. I grew up in a home of 5,

being the youngest. My brother and sister were both grades above me and performed well in

school, so expectations were always high for me. I was always expected to succeed in school just

like my older siblings did. My siblings definitely had an enormous effect of my narrative

literacy. They always taught me new words and pushed me hard in school by setting the bar

high.

We all attended a small charter school in Greensboro, NC called Greensboro Academy.

Attending a small charter school with a graduating class of 150 students, it was a very

disciplined and personal experience that always pushed me to my limits. The school taught us

many things that were not typically taught in the surrounding public schools. When it comes to

reading and writing, we intensively studied and practiced grammar to the point where we would

speed race through classifying sentences. Also, we were required to read many books every year

and be able to test for comprehension on every book. Through 9 years of reading books then

testing for comprehension, I was able to go through a vast amount of series, reading many books

and progressing in reading level through the years.

 Kevin Collins
UWRT 1104

My first vivid memory of reading came from watching Arthur episodes. I used to love

sitting in my Blues Clues chair and watching Arthur on the VCR. After loving the show so

much, my mom started getting me the books. I loved reading the books and read through them

all really quick. Another memory was I remember my brother would always introduce me to

different book series he had read previously and still had. He started me off with reading

Captain Underpants books and Junnie B. Jones. As years went on I progressed to harder reads

like The Hardy Boys and The Boxcar Children. And by Middle school I was in love with Alex

Rider books and the Percy Jackson series.

My first memory of writing was in Kindergarten and 1st grade where in class and for

homework we would practice perfecting our letters on dotted lines and then moving on to

complete sentences. My mom saved some of those sentence practices and I mustve struggled at

first, I innocently wrote some pretty funny words. Throughout the years though, I improved my

writing ability significantly. In 5th grade, I won the Spelling Bee contest in my class.

To conclude, all of these things contributed to creating my own unique literacy narrative.

I believe my school, family, and location all had a large effect on that. Everybody comes from a

different lifestyle and thats why every literacy narrative is different. No two stories can be the

same.