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Isaac Smith
Professor Lynn Raymond
UWRT 1l03-E03
7 September 2014
"When I was Your Age"
The new age technology is simply amazing, from being able to talk to your friend two
thousand miles away to sending a picture to your grandmother down in New Orleans. They have

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new ways of learning to read and coming from a child growing up in the 90's, I can say that the
technology we had was far less advanced than the children of today.
idea of texting, talking has become simpler and faster than having to call
wever, texting has started to transform many people into writing hieroglyphs that
are supg sed to mean something. For example, children of this generation use abbreviations to
mak talking and reading easier. However, to people like me, these abbreviations affect my ~
o learning to read. I would have to learn the different "language" of texting because a few of the
hildren in today's society do not know how to write actual sentences without the abbreviations.
I learned to read by playing on the Windows '98 Desktop and playing games such as Jumpstart
that actually helped us learn how to spell, read, and communicate. These children have laptops
and IPads that can do the reading for them with the help of an audio book. Back when I wanted
to learn to read, those audio books were called Mom and Dad.

When I began to think of how I learned to read, I thought of how my parents learned.
Being born in the 60's, they had even less technology than I did when I was younger. I asked my

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dad how he learned to read and he told me how they had books called "Baby Books" which were
books with a word and picture on each page, which helped associate a picture with a word. They
also had the famous book series of Dick and Jane, which showed actions of the two characters
and related it to a picture. Compared to my literacy narrative, they learned how to read from
books, where I learned how to read by playing computer games. And down the road, my
children's literacy narrative will be much more technology-based than mine ever was.