"Reading with Dad" Process Memo

            At first when writing my literacy timeline, I had a really hard time remembering details from my childhood. It wasn’t as hard thinking about when I was a little older, but a lot of literacy development happens at such a young age that it’s hard to remember that far. A lot of my memories were just things that my parents told me about. I had no idea what I would use as my theme because I felt like after reading the literacy narratives in our book that compared to those authors I was just an average girl with nothing interesting to write about my literacy development. At first, I wasn’t really looking forward to this paper because I couldn’t really connect. But after a while I was able to come up with some memories with my dad and then I realized that I had so much to say about literacy development. It might not be as interesting as some of narratives in our book, but not everyone experiences unique childhoods. I became a little more excited about the paper when I realized my dad would be my theme. Once I started coming up with ideas, I couldn’t stop. I tried to write a timeline but I couldn’t keep the memories in order at first. It was easier for me to just keep writing them down and worry about putting them in order later. I liked this paper because before this I had never realized how much my father contributed to my literacy development. It shows how important family is to me and how much they affected me throughout my life.

            Now that I had a theme, I thought writing my narrative would be easy. It really wasn’t, though. I wrote down everything from my timeline and tried to include details but it only was a page and a half. I really felt like there wasn’t anything else to say. I didn’t want to come to class without a complete paper so I gave it to both of my parents to review and they were a huge help. They highlighted every sentence that didn’t give enough detail and they helped with any grammar problems. They also contributed by using asterisks at the bottom and writing more memories that I didn’t remember on my own. This way, when I did the peer review, my peers hardly had anything to say and it made me feel so much more confident about my paper. They still did find a few things though, and they gave me great criticism and it just made my narrative that much better.

When preparing for the video during the peer review session, it was very helpful when my partner picked out fifteen sentences for my video because it was nice to see it from another person’s point of view. I had already picked out a few sentences myself and this way I could combine both of our sentences to make a great video. Even though combined we had more than fifteen sentences, when I was making the video they didn’t sound as good as I had thought. I didn’t have very many slides at first and it was hard to cut down the sentences to 52 characters per slide without cutting the sentences in weird places. When choosing images, I was very disappointed when I couldn’t find any pictures of me reading with my dad when I was little. It made it a lot harder to make my video personal because I had more pictures of book covers and less pictures of my own family. It was also hard to find a song that was for a father and a daughter that wasn’t a wedding song. But I thought my song choice fit quite well in the end. It was a father singing to his daughter about her growing up. Since my video started from me being very young and ended with me now, I thought this was a perfect fit.

            I think I did a very good job on my literacy narrative and my Animoto slideshow. I put a lot of effort in and I took a lot of time to make it as good as it could be. After watching my video again and looking at my classmates comments, I’m still very satisfied with my video. They agreed that it would have been nice to include a picture of my father and I reading so I’m disappointed that I couldn’t find one to include. I wish I would have just taken a current one but I still don’t think that would have been what I’m looking for. Overall, I’m proud of my hard work and I hope my grade reflects that.