My Literacy Experience

It is kind of difficult to remember how I was taught to read. I remember doing short activities in daycare to help me learn about the letters. We would also get rewarded and praised for successfully singing the abc's.

In school, we did numerous activities:

Elementary school:
Alphabet charts each day
Letter worksheets
Tracing worksheets
Sight words
Read alouds
Short word books.. for example: See me run.
Learned some sign language with letters
Placed into guided reading groups
In upper elementary, a couple times a year we would take a reading assessment on the computers in the computer lab to get our reading lexiles. I really hated these and tried to be the first one finished.
I LOVED the Junie B Jones series.

Middle school:
Read alouds
Reading and typing class in 6th grade
7th and 8th: Language Arts class
Reading program: Reading Counts (Had to get so many points per quarter, or you had to sit out in PE)
I read the Series of Unfortunate Events books throughout middle school. I tried to take the reading test for Little Women (worth over 40 points!) and failed it three times. Turns out the movie isn't the same as the book.

High school:
Reading plays out loud -limited teacher read alouds
Language class each year of high school
Vocabulary words each week (We actually used the front loading activities that we went over last week)
Read the appropriate texts, such as Shakespeare and Harper Lee.
We didn't really have to read very much in high school, which is crazy. We just kept a log of the books we checked out each quarter and discussed each book with our teachers.

Each class I took throughout my public education, there was always required reading. Students who really start out struggling with reading and constantly lag each year really suffer as a result of this, because each class is truly dependent upon reading and comprehending the material (maybe except for math).