3rd Quarter Reflection Blog

Of the books this quarter my favorite had to be the Maze Runner. It was a very interesting book because it is a completely different world with many unique characters. My favorite thing from the book was learning about each characters personality and mind type. For example Minho, possibly my favorite character is a tough kid, but his toughness leads him to be out of control and not think at times. 

In English Language Arts my biggest improvement was in my AoW's. This quarter except for one AoW I did a very good job, I feel at keeping up and submitting though out work. I also feel that after slacking at annotating for a while, I really picked up on it and used the annotations to my advantage. Before I wrote annotations because they were necessary and wrote very few. Now I write plenty and use them to make my write up easier. For example in my last write up, I went back and looked to my annotations in order to answer some of the questions. 

Since the new year I have been really proud of my better time management. At the beginning of the quarter or even year I thought I would slack off and get B's because its my last year and we now have AoW's for Social Studies as well. But thanks to wanting to improve my time management I have been able to get my work done earlier in the week and not save it all for Thursday. Because of my time management I have sustained A's in both classes and felt a little less stressed about the work given out each week.

In my 40 book challenge I think I am around 15-20 books. I've started to pick up my reading as of late but throughout the year I haven't read enough to the point where I think I'll reach the 40 mark. I'll have to double check how many books I have read because I haven't kept very great track.

The most challenging part of the 3rd quarter had to be keeping up with all my work and making time for it all. The biggest area in which I think you have seen this is through some of my vocabulary tests. I know I have gotten A's on most of them but on a few you can see I got some wrong because of spelling errors. The reason I have these spelling errors is because on Thursday I don't find enough time then and throughout the week to study. That also has to do with my time management skills but I'm hoping to pick things up during 4th quarter.

My blogs have gotten a bit lengthier since August and I think over time I have used a higher level of vocabulary. Our vocabulary tests and other readings we have had, contributed to my increase in vocabulary. Also I have used the thesaurus to learn similar words that are of higher level. What I want to better though, is that I have done too much summarizing and I want to stick to my prompts better.

The main strategy that has worked is progressing through my AoW's throughout the week. I try to finish reading and annotating on Monday or Tuesday and then Wednesday and Thursday I finish the write up. What I have found out about myself is that I focus better at school and found that my AoW's are much better written up when I am focused in. So during homeroom when we have time to work on homework I will work on my AoW's so I can get them done.  Since we have AoW's for Social Studies too I get that one done early in the week so I don't have to worry about it Thursday.

I have learned so much about ISIS and the rest of the world than I would have without the AoW's and AoW gallery walks. I think it was a great experience for the whole class to learn about week to week topics that concern the whole world. I mean I learned about ISIS's growth over the course of the last few months. It is incredible when I think of all the things I have learned. Also you learn about amazing stories from around the world and have gotten to write our responses to them.

 Both our class and our Social Studies have had a standard where we must support all of our answers with evidence. I think both classes have really prepared me for any essays I will have to write in the future that involve finding evidence. Now I know what is relevant but that isn't the biggest area I think I have improved. I think when it comes to analyzing my textual evidence I have improved and understand better why analyzing it is so essential to a good essay. I want to become better and better at incorporating evidence into my essays.