2nd Quarter Reflections

In English Language Arts I think I made my biggest improvement with annotating and being able to explain my thoughts out loud. For example, I improved a lot on the Socratic seminars for Of Mice and Men, which deal a lot with this skill. Last year when I did Socratic seminars I only contributed to the conversation once or possibly twice. But this quarter, I talked four or five times during the seminars. This is an improvement that I planned out as a goal for myself. I worked at getting my thoughts together in a way that would make it easy for me to push them into the conversation. I met my goal and improved with the Socratic seminar itself, as well as my grade for it. To do this I had to have more thorough annotations in my book. I improved with the quality of the annotations in my book. When I think of the annotations I made last year, they seem like they were slightly vague and didn’t have much to do with the blogs that we wrote about the book later. But this year it seems like I dug deeper into my reading and understood my book further. I could tell that I improved when I was writing my blogs. Previously I would have to reread parts to find the information that I needed, but this year I could flip to the spot and there would likely be an annotation giving me the information or an idea that I needed. This likely helped me additionally improve on my blogs, but I mainly improved on my annotations.

        The most challenging part of 2nd Quarter was probably writing essays and blogs. I would always sit or zone out because I couldn’t think of what to write. When I did this I would likely need to do these for homework and I also procrastinated with that too. But, I started making sure that I was in a quiet place when I did my work so that I could focus and be able to do my best work. This ended up working and I have been able to get all of my work done.

       There have been many different strategies that have benefited me for different things. One strategy has been annotating in all my books. Even when I am reading a personal reading book that isn’t being checked and I’m not going to have to write something about, I have found myself annotating just so I have a better understanding. With doing this, I don’t need to reread parts and I have a better overall understanding of what I’m reading. Another strategy that has helped me is asking other people for their thoughts on what I have written. This helps me see another point of view on my writing and be able to make improvements on it. My final strategy that I have been using is asking the person sitting next to me for help when I need it. Whether it’s an instruction that I’m confused about or a certain word I can’t remember, asking the person next to me helps a lot. In the past I have just sat silently being confused, but now I always know what to do.

I commented on Delilah’s blog, Ava’s blog, and Yolihuani’s blog.