The three most important things that I learned this year are the importance of annotating, how to work well with others, and express my feelings/thoughts . I think that annotating is important because you are making yourself find the meaning of the text you are reading. It also helps you understand the article/passage more. Another thing that I learned this year that was important was how to work well with others. In general I do work well with some people, but in this class whenever we had to work with partners I had to learn to listen to what they thought instead of always saying that I was right and they had to do it my way. In this class I feel that I opened up more. I rarely ever share my feelings with people. Even if you are my best friend, I don't like letting people know how I feel. I think that's because people always label me as being "perfect" but I know I'm not and that's fine. Since people think that I'm perfect, whenever I have a problem I don't like to share it because I don't want people knowing I'm sensitive. In this class we've had many group discussions and I have learned that it's okay to share your feelings. Sharing your feelings allows you to get all the weight of your shoulders, and that is one of the reasons why I really liked this class.
Something we did this year that I think I'll remember for the rest of my life is when we had reading buddies. I think that I will remember this for the rest of my life because I had a part in a child's life by helping them read. I had fun helping my buddy Mia because Sumar and I watched her improve in these seven months helping her read. Knowing that I had an impact on a child's life means a lot because I actually helped them with a skill that they will need to use for the rest of their lives.
The nicest thing someone in this class did for me was having Sumar help me revise my argumentative essay. Although it took some time for her to get me to understand why I needed to change it, I eventually got my essay to make sense. Sumar gave critical advice and instead of just saying, "Fix that it won't work." she would tell me why it would not work. She did a good job telling me what was wrong and would not sugar coat anything just because we're friends. Sumar would tell me if it was good or if it needed improvement.
Something that I taught both my teacher and classmates was about how scientist grew mini-brains to help study why certain diseases happen. I used this topic as an AOW a couple months ago and I think that it was my best one because during the gallery walk I explained my topic very thoroughly and many of my classmates seemed interested in why they grew mini-brains. This article also taught me many things and I thought that if I learned many new things then so would the class. My classmates that saw my article during the gallery walk asked me questions to clarify what this was about and how would it help, and I was prepared to answer all their questions. Based on their expressions and words, I could tell that they were a bit bewildered on why these mini-brains were being grown; after I had clarified it, they seemed to have learned something new.
The area that I feel I made the most improvement in is summarizing. Before this class I had trouble knowing which pieces of information I should include. I knew that a summary was a brief explanation as to what your article was about, but you only used the key ideas. In this class I learned that you should decide what the main idea of the article is and then analyze the growth it had throughout the text. A good summary consists of the main point of the article and what the impact was on the rest of the writing.
For me the most challenging part of the year was picking out an article that met the requirements. To me this was difficult because I had to make sure the article gave an adequate amount of information and I had to be able to explain why I chose this article. Explaining why I chose the article was difficult because I had to say why it was important to the world, but I only had a reason on why it was important to the country. I think that the main reason why I had difficulty on explaining was because of the article topic, and it also did not include a good amount of information.
The best piece of writing I did this year was my poem called, "Crushed". I think that this poem was my best piece of writing because it really shows the impact that a dream not coming true has on a person's life. Out of all the poems I've written this year, this one uses the most figurative language. I always had a hard time with figurative language, but somehow with this poem it was really easy. While writing this poem I had to imagine what it was like having a dream that was crushed. I think that since I had to put myself into someone else's shoes, I had a lot of emotion showing. This poem is actually one of my favorite's because people don't realize that to someone a dream can mean their whole world.
Of the books I've read this year my favorite was "Half Brother" by Kenneth Oppel, because this book really showed the meaning of friendship, even though it was between a boy and a chimpanzee. This story had a big character development because in the beginning the boy thought that raising a chimp would be a waste of time, but over the next chapters he started to really care for the chimp. I can relate to the boy in this book a bit because I have become friends with people that I didn't like at first, but then I realized that they were a great person and were fun to be with.
The advice I would give to students that will be in the class next year is to never give up if things do not go your way, and hard work really pays off. I say this because in this class I have had many problems writing poems because I could not get any inspiration, but I did not give up. I would write down feelings I had and found words that perfectly described it. Working really hard does pay off because if you work hard in this class, you will learn things that you will remember for the rest of your life. What you do in this class will also affect how you do in the future. I know this class may seem really difficult because you work a greater pace than others and get more work, but I had a great time in this class and I hope you do too.
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