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Letters
When I was in Kindergarden I remember sitting at my kitchen table writing my ABCs with my mom. This is the only memory I have of learning how to write. -
Colouring
I watched my brother colour, and copied him. He always outlined his images in a darker colour than what he was using to fill them in. -
Home School
My mom homeschooled me for three years. I remember learning cursive and thinking it was cool. -
Letters Home
We lived overseas and wrote postcards and letters to our family in America. I found some of them at my grandma's house a few years ago. I was horrible at spelling (I still am). Some examples: sits (sights), tomaro (tomorrow), whate (wait), ower (our), butiful (beautiful), and ture (tour). -
Dolphins
My fourth grade teacher had us do a research report on an animal of our choosing. It was the first time that I was able to use writing as a way of learning something new. -
Cursive
My fifth grade teacher forced us to write in cursive and I hated it. -
Middle School
I had a lot of fun writing in middle school because my teachers gave us fun projects. We had to write our own version of a fairytale, and we had a big mutligenre report that we could almost do whatever we wanted with. -
Friends
In high school my friends and I wrote a lot to each other. We would pass notes & drawings but we would also pass stories. One person would start the story, then hand it off to the next person to continue it. Sometimes we wouldn't be allowed to see what everyone else wrote so that it would turn out to be really random. Around junior year we got a notebook and started using that instead of loose paper. Everything is kept together, and we still have it today. We had to tape another notebook to it. -
Poems
I also wrote poetry with my friends. We would narrate our time in high school with peoms. I'm not very good at peotry, but my friend was. She has a poem that's four or five pages long that tells all about the first few years of high school. If we started joking about something someone said or did, we'd write a peom about it. We have peoms about invisible horses, bacon, and a few other things. -
English with Symmonds
My senior english teacher, Mrs. Symmonds, was an amazing writing teacher. She transformed the way her students viewed writing. Going into the class the majority of students hated writing and really struggled with it. She turned writing into something fun. Instead of looking at it like something we had to do, we saw it as something we wanted to do. It was still very difficult, but I loved it. We wrote all the time and she validated all of our ideas and made us into better, confidant, writers. -
College English 101
My first english class in college was annoying. I had just finished an amazing writing class in High School, and this class was nothing like it. It was not challenging at all. I could tell that there was a difference between my writing level and those of the students around me. There was one other student from my high school and we were the only ones getting As on our papers. I belive this is because I took Mrs. Symmonds class in high school. -
College English 102
My second college writing class was better than the first. I was allowed to write about what interested me. I was very upset with the grades that I was getting though. The students that were not as strong of writers were getting graded on effort, and they almost always got As or Bs. I always got good grades on my writing, but I felt like this teacher was using grades to make me work harder. I wouldn't have a problem with this if she did it with the whole class, but she didn't.