1. What is literacy to you?
Literacy to me is someone’s ability to function with a language. My interpretation of literacy comes from my experience with Mandarin Chinese. An individual can be fluent in Chinese but not literate.
2. Who’s one of your SoL?
One of my sponsors of literacy is my elementary school. Every year, the school puts on “Read-a-thon” a three-week-ish long event where students are encouraged to read as many books as possible.
3. Write a scene with this
SoL like Fishman did in her
piece. (200+ words)
It’s May of 2012 at Julia Redd Elementary School. It’s time for Read-a-thon, a three-week-ish long event where students are encouraged to read as many books as possible with the promise of relatively extravagant prizes. The prizes usually ranged from ribbons, to guitars, to a ride to McDonald’s in a limo. I was never really interested in the prizes because, after my very first year of participating, I realized that every year the winner would be the person who read the easiest reading books and picture books. Instead, the event taught me the simple enjoyment of reading. I went from not really reading in kindergarten to being a reading fool from first grade through today because the event gave me the choice of what I read, rather than having to read what my class was. I did not play the game that other students did in order to farm pages; my mode of reading was more serious. In this instance, I was just finishing Brisingr in the Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini. Books with a thousand pages chock-full of type were not going to cut it if I even tried. So, I never really tried; I simply continued reading whatever effort I was on whenever Read-a-thon started. This year, I welcomed the three weeks without any other homework from teachers and read even more than I usually would with homework. I finished the book in time for summer when I could just get to the last book of the series and read it without any other obligations. So, while I did not necessarily embrace the spirit of Read-a-thon, the event put on by Julia Redd certainly gave me my current love of all literature.