Literacy Autobiography Anecdote

When my sisters and I were young we had a blue plastic Fisher-Price easel with a green chalkboard on one side and a giant notepad for painting on the other. My older sister was seven years older than my twin and me, so in our play she would be the "teacher" and us her students. One of my earliest memories of writing comes from her teaching us to write our names on that chalkboard before we even knew the alphabet. This did not teach me how to spell or read or even the alphabet; this taught me the concept that a word, as a whole, could be symbolic of a physical thing, in this case, me. It helped establish the idea that the black scribbles in books and papers each had a meaning in language. I think this formation of a connection between words and their representations is an important starting point in the development of both reading and writing.