This year my English literacy class was really different and unique from other groups. The other groups they had a unit about America. But for my literacy class, we called The Liger Leadership Team, we took a different approach to learn the advanced literacy skills and as well learn to be independent and be the leader for other students. For the first few weeks, we have been reading some kid books such as Mr. Nosey, Arrow to the Sun, and Rosie Revere, Engineer. I realized that literature and literacy skills can be learned from any kind level of books. Even though the above books were written for kids but I found out that it included some of the advance literacy skills such as repetition, idiom, onomatopoeia, alliteration, and a tremendous amount of new vocabulary.
Beside from that, we were the first literacy group to read the book called The Rent Collector. The Rent Collector was written by a foreign author, Cameron Wright. So The Rent Collector was a 50% story based on a real life of Sang Ly’s family, who live at the landfill at Steung Meanchey that struggle to fight through to survive and find a better life for herself and her son who is always sick. Sang Ly had a dream to learn how to write and read. But at one day, she asked Sopeah who was the “the rent collector”, and who was normally care about herself. But she ended up accept to teach Sang Ly and at last literature play a role in Sang Ly’s life and help her right through the difficulties she had faced.
As a final product, we had created our own literature event about our book, launch our Lit Studio which is our library, and share our poem about The Rent Collector. The event went so well, everyone enjoys listening to our inspiring speech about The Rent Collector, book summary, students’ testimonials, and spoken word. I had written a few poems and I had an opportunity to share one of them the crowd that was expressing Sang Ly’s feeling when she lived at the dump.