Literacy Journies: How We Learn to Read and Write

As teachers, our personal experiences with literacy will affect our attitudes toward literacy and the way we teach it to our students. Maybe we have meaningful and positive memories of learning to write, or negative and painful memories of struggling with reading. Whatever our past holds, it has influenced the way we think about literacy. It is important to reflect on our experiences and remember the process of learning to read and write so that we can better understand how to provide opportunities for our students to have meaningful and positive experiences with literacy. In Pat Johnson's and Katie Keier's book, Catching Readers Before They Fall: Supporting Readers Who Struggle, there is a huge emphasis on the importance of children's construction of a reading process system. This involves a network of literacy strategies that are integrated with and supportive of one another. Some examples of these strategies include predicting, visualizing, and synthesizing. When a collection of these strategies is obtained by a child, they can then integrate them to construct a reading process system that will serve them as proficient readers. Some may think that reading is simply the ability to accurately recognize sequences of letters as words, but it is much more complex than that. "Reading is making meaning" (Johnson & Keier, 2010, 15). Those who have successfully constructed a reading process system are able to read text fluently and make meaning out of the text. By understanding what a reading process system is and how we have personally constructed our own, we can provide opportunities for meaningful interaction with literacy that will best support our students' constructions of their own reading process systems.