Literacy Autobiography 5:

One of the most rewarding aspects of experiencing literacy development is to experience it vicariously. As a parent, I have had the privilege of observing my children's blooming literacy and  recorded some of their expressions.

Young children are novices at language, and yet brilliant at creatively expressing themselves. They don't have a rich vocabulary, but they form unique combinations of the words they have in order to accurately depict their experiences. It is this creative expression that we cherish and find so endearing. 

At age 3, my daughter would sometimes use words to approximate the spoken language she heard around her. "What my doing?" was her way of asking "what am I doing?" When my son was 3, he would end all his sentences with ".....orsomepin." This was a mystery until I figured out that he was imitating our speech, as we often ended a question by saying, "can I get you another sandwich or something?"

Sometimes my daughter would combine incongruous words to express herself: "I want a big full!" instead of "I want a lot!" When she wanted another strawberry, she might say, "that first one didn't enough."

Well before the children were able to read, they recognized that letters could be combined to represent objects. To get my daughter to go into her car seat, I might say, "maybe we could put a D-O-N-U-T in a ziploc bag and give it to her in the car?" And my daughter would overhear this and exclaim, "Oh yes, I want a D-O!"

Autumn teaching her younger sister, Faith, to read

Recognizing how my own children acquired spoken language and how this prepared them to acquire reading and writing skills was a lesson to me in respecting both the learning process and the innate creativity of students to work with the tools they have in order to express themselves.