Reflection Blog

Over the past year, we have been writing on our English blog on books that we read over the course of the year. The end of the year is very close, and this is a final reflection blog on all the work that we’ve done. Looking back at all the work, you can really see the time go by.

At the beginning of the year as we were settling in, I found there was an adjustment to my English class from previous years. Grade nine being more structured and literature based. Being our first book, I found that I struggled with Romeo and Juliet quite a bit, carelessly checking my work. The “Lovesick Romeo” writing had twenty-two errors in it. Looking back I’m shocked that I slipped up with twenty-two. Luckily for me we were not penalized for our spelling and grammar errors that much. Jumping ahead to our “Memoir Writing” I had written an essay three times longer with only three errors. I’m very pleased with myself as I have learned over the years I have a tendency to rush things and no check them over. It’s a skill that I have started to pick up on over this year.
Another skill I feel improved on was taking literature and using it in more creative ways. Writing about a book and certain aspects is easy, but when you take the book and use it to creatively do more, it reaches into your brain and really makes you think. A good example of how I have improved would be the Romeo and Juliet “Comic Strip”. I found I had a lot of trouble with trying to think of how to make it in a way that was artistic but still had the content. Skipping ahead to the Paper Shadows “Radio Dramatization,” it was a similar project in the sense you had to paraphrase the words from the book. Even though this was in a group as to the comic, I still felt that my ideas were much better expressed than they were many months before.

When given the songwriting project for Of Mice and Men, I was very excited as this was the type of project I had been looking forward to quite some time. I was very proud of myself for this work as I felt I connected my knowledge of the book with rhythm and timing, to collectively put it together. As said above, I felt my need to take the information and display it in a new way was what I needed to work on and I felt that I did that very well for the song. Personally when trying to write a song I never seem to finish, but because this was school work it pushed me to finish and helped me out in a couple of different ways.

As we leave grade nine and enter grade ten, there are two goals I have in mind for the coming year. My first goal is to try really hard to not make too many little errors in my writing. To do so I will do my best to work on my grammar and spelling and see if I can learn any new grammar techniques. The second goal is to try learn styles of writing to further my own way so that when I’m writing I can change it up a little bit for writing things where I’d normally just use one format.