1st Quarter Reflections

    I believe that my first quarter in seventh grade went fairly well over all, but I’m not here to talk about all my classes but one in general. Can you guess? Ha... what other class than ELA would I be discussing? I’ll start boring you by jumping right in because I want to get this over with! The first question I’ll be covering is “What we’re some struggles you had first quarter in ELA?” Well... since you asked, for the most part I think I did a pretty good job, but if I had to talk about what struggles I had I’d definitely put... understanding. There were a lot of times where I was faced with a question and I didn’t know the answer and I was really confused, I’d sit at my seat thinking of what the question meant or how to answer it and eventually class would end and I’d have to do it for homework. Sometimes the questions would be spur of the moment and I’d have to rely on my table mates for the answer, of course I am fine with admitting that I don’t know something but when it happens more often I start thinking down on myself, especially since I hold myself to such high standards and it feels like everyone else does as well.

    Since I started off with lots of gloomy stuff I will talk about my successes, if I have any at all... well I think the first thing to share would be reading, I have been reading more and more and have been expanding my likes and dislikes in books. Okay, an example, I read my first memoir this year and I really didn’t think I would like it but it was... different. In a good way, I love it. I didn’t think that someone’s life could be so interesting and amazing, being in Mrs. Larson’s ELA class has really opened my eyes to a new world and I am so glad that I have been able experience new genres of books and new writing styles. For homework we have been assigned 30 minutes of independent reading and that gets me in the habit of reading more often, and in my case, I’m not a fast reader and in earlier years I have pushed reading to the side because I liked other subjects more.

   Okay... I’m almost done, then you can leave. Every year, at the end of each quarter/ the start of a new quarter we get asked what our goals will be for the next quarter. I have always found it easy to set a goal in ELA because they only wanted one goal from us, how many books do you want to read? I try to answer that question with a realistic answer, and really, I only think I would be able to finish reading one book. I have said it before and will say it again now... I READ SLOWLY. It takes me 6 hours to read a book with 200 pages and I am ashamed of that. I want to be able to read a lot but with the disadvantages of being a slow reader and not being as motivated to read, I don’t read a lot in one quarter. I think my goal will be to practice grammar, I have been taught very little grammar in my years of being alive and I get really upset because when it comes down to the language MAP test I don’t the best score in the world. With the Winter MAP coming up I want to be more prepared in the language portion of the test. Did you enjoy learning about stuff in my ELA class? I would hope so! (I’m really sorry. Enjoy your day that I ruined by making you read this :)