My Story
Charley, LaVelda

>>LAVELDA: [Speaking in a foreign language] I am from Mexican Water, Arizona. I teach at Red Mesa High School in Red Mesa, Arizona. I am a part of the Visti Writing Project from Farmington, New Mexico. Here is my story of how I learned how to read and write. Growing up in Navaho, my parents actually were the ones that still stressed reading to me and writing and education in general. I remember, now that I think about it, my mom does the same thing with my niece now. She'll read with my niece and I know that it's the same thing that she did with me and we would just cuddle up in bed or something and she'd read and try her best to continue to instill that love of reading with me. Until I started doing summer programs, there was a townhouse for urban areas. On the reservation people would come from all over and we'd have Bible school, Bible studies and so on. I used to go over there; I didn't grow up in a church kind of home or anything but I used to love those stories that they would read to us and they would act it out and they would put so much energy into it and I would go home and like whatever it was they were doing even though I didn't know what I was reading. [Laughing] It was so much fun. That's where my love of reading came because it was time for me to express myself and to reacting through reading the stories and telling the stories and just story telling in general. My first big writing project was in fourth grade. I told a story about how my teacher was kidnapped by some characters, I don't remember the actual story itself, but I remember my teacher and she was just so excited that I wrote about her and I think that's probably why I became a teacher's pet. Definitely one of those things and ever since then, ever since fourth grade, ever since she started telling everybody how great a writer I am and I believed it. I believed that I was really a great writer. Since then I've just wrote and wrote and wrote. With the National Writing Project now I've definitely found my niche as far as being a writer and I am proud to say that I am a writer and I'm excited about that. Now, after reading and writing in English for so long, I try to really hard to incorporate my own native language which is Navaho now and a lot of my pieces actually have Navaho in them. That's where I started going towards learning how to write Navaho and read in Navaho just so that I can incorporate that more in my stories and my writing. When I read to my students in my classroom I do the same thing. When they don't understand something we take a break from the reading itself and then we talk about how it connects to something they might have learned with their grandparents or their parents or the home setting and talk about how it could be translated into Navaho. Then that creates that discussion factor for us saying, "Oh that? I know what you're talking about now. I know what the story is about." So that was one of the ways that we break it up and translate their understanding where they're coming from home and that we can continue to read and write what we need to do as far as the English stuff goes. That's about it. [Laughing]