Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Literacy Narrative Process Memo


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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