Jaylene Scott
Professor Rinke
English 150
February 27, 2013
Reflective
Memo
Writing this timeline was a very fun experience for me.
It gave my parents and I a chance to reminisce about our pas and had a few good
laughs. The most logical place for me to start the timeline was when I said my
first word, because that’s where literacy starts. I did have a hard time
remembering details, I had to ask my parents a lot questions about it, and even
they didn't remember some of it. After my parents filled me in on my earlier
years, I didn't have a problem getting everything down on paper because I
remembered the events that really influenced me.
Something interesting I realized about my literacy
development while composing my timeline that I had never previously thought of
was that my mom really helped me. I knew she did the normal stuff, like reading
to me every night and what not, but she did a lot more that I did not remember.
The theme I decided to focus on was how books influenced my early childhood.
Ever since I was young, I loved to read, and poems really interested me. I
loved how they could take you to an imaginary land and you forgot about all of
your current problems for a little while. It was not difficult to pick this
theme, because books have always been there for me. It was the first thing I
thought of and went from there. The experience of creating a timeline made me
realize that I had a lot of potential, as long as I was willing to work hard
for it.
When I was writing my timeline, I noticed I only had
experiences that had to do with books, so when it was time to begin my narrative,
it was not hard to focus on the theme. I wrote the narrative in the only way it
would make sense, in chronological order. It was not difficult to write this
into a draft, rather easy actually. The literacy timeline served as my
prewriting strategy, everything I wanted to say was already on paper in order.
It couldn't get any better than that. After composing my rough draft, I got rid of
some stories that didn't need to be there. At first I felt like I was trying to
cover way too much, so I narrowed it down to events specifically in elementary
school.
To be honest, my partner didn't really do much to help
me. We spent the whole period working on his paper, and never got around to
mine. When I made the final edits to my narrative, I was most definitely
thinking about how I would turn the story into a slideshow. I was really
worried because in the animoto slideshow, they limit the number of characters
you can use per slide. I didn’t know if I was able to limit my story even more than
before.
As I said earlier, my partner and I never got around to
looking at my paper. So I had to choose the 15 sentences myself. I ended up
using all of the sentences I chose and more. At first I struggled with the
52-character limit. There really isn't a strategy, you just have to play around
with the words until they fit and make sense. The pictures I used in my
slideshow were a great buffer. My pattern was two text slides and one picture
slide and so on. I would use the pictures to compliment my text, so if I mentioned
a book, I showed a picture of the book. I would say half of my pictures were
personal, and the other half of the pictures were from the web. They helped my
story because if I said “In fifth grade...” I would then show a picture of me
was in the fifth grade to help give them some visual.
I love the song I chose to comment my theme in the
slideshow. The song was called “Happy” and it did everything I wanted it to. At
first It started slow, just like my slideshow, and then as time went on, it
sped up, just in time with the story when I really started getting into the
core of my literacy story.
After I watched the video again, I could honestly say I’m
very happy with it. I’m proud of myself and I’m very happy with the grade I had
received. The challenge was really fun with me. I wouldn't change a thing.
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