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January 24th, 2000
From birth, my parents read to me and sang to me constantly. -
6 months
At six months my parents started singing to me in Irish. -
8-9 months
At 8 months I couldn't speak but was learning to convey emotion through noises such as crying, yelling at laughing. At nine months I said my first words. First "dada" and soon after "mama" -
12 months
At twelve months I was learning to connect actions with words, such as grasping my hands and trying to say "give me." -
12- 24 months
MY parents were singing, speaking and teaching me to count in Irish. Before bed my parents brought me around the house and said goodnight to everything with me. I couldn't say goodnight but I said "ni ni book, ni ni chair, ni ni cup." I was always singing but with noises that somewhat sounded like words. -
2-3 years
When I was two my family moved to Ireland. I began to say small words, such as ball, no, and mine. By two and a half I could string a few words together. When my parents would read to me, I would try to put my finger on each words they said. By three I could say simple sentences and could try to explain when something happened, such as in preschool a boy bit me and I referred to him as the "bad boy." -
3 years old
When I was three I could count to ten and do "head, shoulders, knees and toes" in both Irish and English. My parents played Spanish CD's with basic learning and music which taught me things such as counting. I also learned easy Spanish words like "adios" and "vamanos" from television shows such as Dora The Explorer. -
4-5 years old
At four I started Junior infants and St.Lawrences National School. My parents started letting me pick out my own books which I would try to read to myself, but I could only read a few of the words in them and made up the rest. In junior infants I learned how to write and spell basic words such as dog, cat, bad, good. I could communicate with teachers and friends. By five I was reading books that usually had three or four simple sentences on a page. My favorite book was Goodnight Gorilla. -
6-7 years old
In the first and the second grade, I had a teacher who didn't encourage creativity in writing. By then, I was reading small chapter books and poems, and was learning to write in cursive. We spoke Irish in the classroom for things such as asking to go to the bathroom, prayers, and singing. My favorite books were by Roald Dahl, and we always kept them in the house. I started at a drama school where I was taught to memorize short lines. -
8-9 years old
When I was eight, my best friend and I competed with each other to see how fast we could read books. We read simple but relatively long books like Harry Potter, Matilda, and A Series of Unfortunate Events. In school we were reading and writing in Irish and had to memorize and translate Irish poetry. -
10-11 years old
When I was ten my family moved to America. I stopped writing in cursive, because my peers wrote in print. My language changed, as I first started to fake the American accent and slang before it grew on me. In our English class we divided into book clubs, which was my first experience discussing books. -
12-14 years old
In middle School my seventh grade grammar teacher was strict and had rules I'd never heard before. One of the most ridiculous rules was that a proper paragraph must be at least ten sentences. My paragraphs rarely fit this standard so that teacher and I didn't get on very well. -
14-16 years old
When I started at Arlington High School, I realized that my grammar was much worse than I thought, but I learned with practice. My favorite book that year was The Bean Trees, because I was expecting it to be much worse that it was. In my sophomore english class, we started every day with a 10 minute journal exercise, which taught me to write more freely and in different styles.
