As a student growing up I was always interested in reading, but I never really had an amazing literacy event that shaped the way I thought about teaching literacy. The most influential event that I had did not come until many years later when I took TE 301 and was assigned to work with a struggling reader who was in the third grade. When I first began working with my student, she was reading at a first grade level and was not engaged in reading at all, and even told me that she does not like to read. Through the semester of working with the student I saw an amazing transformation in her that would greatly influence how I think about literacy.
Every week, I would pull the student out of her classroom and work with her on different literacy aspects, but specifically focused each week on how to decode words. I picked a small chapter book that we read together throughout the semester and her reading changed from extremely choppy, without prosody, and unable to decode, to decoding words on her own, and some prosody, with an increase in her reading speed. One day towards the end of the semester, she was so excited to show me something that she had gotten over the weekend. She started to explain to me that she begged her mom to take her to a book store, and she showed me excitedly the book that she picked out and explained to me that she had already read three of the chapters. By the end of working with my student she had moved up a grade level in her reading assessment which was extremely exciting for me to see that I had helped her improve in her literacy skills. This experience was extremely eye opening, because it helped me to see the power of literacy. My student had gained an extreme confidence boost in her literacy ability which completely changed her attitude towards reading. This experienced has inspired me to teach literacy to my future students in the same form that I helped her, in that I hope to increase my students self-confidence in reading which in turn can help them become better readers and students in general.