Literacy Life Assignment and Examples:

The goal of this project is to celebrate the diversity of our personal (childhood or adolescent) literacy backgrounds. Sharing our unique experiences with literacy will help us build our classroom community. Reflecting on our own and each other's literacy histories will help us understand the wide-range of experiences and worldviews our readers bring into our classrooms and libraries.

For those who want to introduce themselves as younger readers:

You will draft a literacy timeline. Your timeline should span from birth to the age of the children you are currently teaching or plan to teach. These are some questions that will help you create your literacy timeline:

• What memories do you have about stories, books, and/or reading as a child? (These memories can be from home, school, libraries, scouting, religious institutions, or other literacy places.)
• Who are the people who made a difference in your early literacy experiences?
• Besides books, what other media played a part in your early literacy (oral storytelling, TV, movies...)?
• Are there specific story/book/movie titles or genres (such as poetry, science fiction, fantasy) that stand out in your recollections?

After you have drafted your timeline, use it as a prewriting tool to create a portrait of your early literacy life. Turn your creativity loose!

Prewriting and Poem (Non-narrated) Example: Literacy Timeline and "Where I'm from" Poem with Illustration

Narrated Example: "Where I'm from" by Judi Moreillon, illustrated poem using VoiceThread

For those who want to introduce themselves as older readers:

You will create an inside-outside portrait of yourself as a young adult. One way you can do this is with an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper and mixed media. Inside the portrait shape, you will represent important components of your adolescent life: including literature, activities, objects, concepts, important people and more. Outside the portrait, you will place symbols of the outside world that were relevant to your life at that time in history.

• What memories do you have about stories, books, and/or reading as an adolescent? (These memories can be from home, school, libraries, scouting, religious institutions, or other literacy places.)
• Who are the people who made a difference in your young adult literacy experiences?
• Besides books, what other media played a part in your adolescent literacy (music, TV, films...)?
• Are there specific story/book/movie titles or genres (such as poetry, science fiction, fantasy) that stand out in your recollections?
• What was happening in the world around you at that time?

You can scan your portrait and post the image file to your reading records wiki, or you can use another Web 2.0 tool such as Glogster.com (link to sample) or "The Newspaper Clipping" generator used below to represent your literary self.

Examples: