Language Arts Reflection

This year in Language Arts, I have grown in my ability to take in my peers critique and show revisions through the final product. I think revisions really helps making writing better and it for sure help mine. I think growing in this can really help you, and with all the feedback from the critique you get is really helpful.

One project that supports my growth is the Conflict/Genocide Poster. I felt the purpose of the project was to raise awareness for a certain conflict or genocide. The process of creating this poster was a little long. The first thing we did was decide what conflict you wanted to cover. I chose to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  This conflict is a big fight over land. What really influenced my decision on the conflict was reading a book before we stated this unit called The Bottle in the Gaza Sea. This was about the daily life of a teenage boy in Gaza Strip and a teenage girl in Jerusalem. Later on in the book the boy finds a letter in the sea and writes the girl back. From then on they start to talk a lot. This book gave me a really good perspective on what happens in each of those countries and how the people feel about it. It made me really want to get the word out about and spread awareness for this conflict. Secondly I was gave a paper where I wrote what my visual metaphor and statistic where going to be. My visual metaphor which is the representation of a person, place, thing, or idea with using a visual image that expresses a particular point of reason. My statistic was challenging to find because your statistic really had to go with the flow of your poster.  A statistic is a fact or piece of data using numbers in the data. You could say my statistic changed a lot. Our diction which is the choice of wording was very important also. That goes along with the statistic going with the flow of the poster. Next I started my drafts of my poster which I had two weeks to complete. During creating the drafts I got feedback from my Language Arts class. The first step to finalizing the poster was to trace my picture I created using the program called Gimp on to linoleum block. After doing that I was able to carve the linoleum block which was the fun part I think. Then you would ink your block onto the poster paper. Last thing was to go back where I created the poster and type my slogan and statistic in.

One artifact I have is my final poster and my other ideas I had for the poster. My first draft was to have an Israeli man and a Palestinian man pulling a peace symbol. This really never came together because the stat and slogan I had didn’t flow with it at the time. I spent a lot of time trying to come up with both of these. the critique I got back was very helpful. I had the critique on post-it notes, so that way I cold have the critique in front of me while trying to fnd a new idea. My poster changed multiple times until finally I and my teacher came across a great idea. The final draft is two silhouettes of men playing tug of war over a key. This symbolizes them fighting over land. My slogan is no lock is built without a key. My statistic is the existence of settlements leads violations of many of the human rights of Palestinians.

Another project that supports my growth is the Memoir project. For this project you had write a memoir about an experience you had in life. I really liked this project a lot I had fun during the process of it and because I was able to express myself through a piece of writing that could be about anything. I chose to write about a time when I was playing basketball. The reason I chose to write about basketball because as I am still growing up I love basketball it doesn’t matter if I’m reading about or watching or even better if I’m playing it. Even though basketball wasn’t my first love it will always be my last. This project process was about two or three weeks. The first thing the teacher had me do was a fast writing activity where we wrote ideas that we could use for our memoir. I had so many ideas like my first pair of shoes, my first birthday, and even my first year of soccer. I wrote all these down not knowing at the time that I probably won’t be able to remember these since I was so young. I first decided to write about my year in soccer. Then next steps I did was write my introduction, body paragraphs, and closing, all of them being the first draft. Well the thing was I couldn’t have all these because I could hardly remember my first year. So I switched it to a time that I could remember playing basketball. Then my classmates and I did peer critique on each of our memoirs. The way we did this was leave comments on the word documents where the memoir was written. We had probably about three peer critique sessions throughout the course of the project. This helped me a lot with the all the comments I got. I put them into use and created the final draft. My three main things to focus on were diction, imagery opening/closing. Diction as I said before is the choice of wording in writing. This was very important to have good diction because I wanted my memoir to sound really nice. A visual metaphor is the use of figurative language or visually descriptive language. I wanted to have a lot of this because I wanted the reader to feel as if they were me in my situation at that exact moment in time. Lastly we spent a lot of time going over different ways to begin and end our memoir. So an exercise we did for this was write at minimum two opening paragraphs and two closing paragraphs. This was so during peer critique they could critique both that way I could pick which one I felt was better. In fact one of the peer critique days were devoted just to opening and closings that way we could the best opening and closing as possible.

An artifact from this project to support my growth is my final memoir which includes drafts and peer critique comments. The part of the memoir I would like to explain how it fits my growth is the feedback I got on my closing paragraph. A whole class period was spent on peer critiquing the closing paragraph. I had two paragraphs written at the time for my closing because, I couldn’t decide which one was better. Well during the peer critique one of my classmates advised that I use the first one because he could relate to it. So for my final I chose that one, and this is what it looks like."As I stepped onto the court, the feeling was indescribable. The crowd was cheering so loud I couldn’t hear coach say anything. Dylan and I lined up on each elbow while Joe was waiting to get the ball to throw it in. Jake and Matt stood on the other side of the court waiting for the play. The ref hands the ball to Joe and blows his whistle. Dylan runs over to me and sets a screen so I can go get the ball. It works! I got the ball and the time is ticking, so I am running down the court faster than Usain Bolt. As I get to their side of the court this time Matt sets a screen for me. I lose the player who is guarding me and go to the mid corner three. I glance at the clock. There are two seconds left, so I turn and look back at the basket. I send my shot off and the buzzer sounds. Swish! It’s in. I did it, I won the game! I run down the court screaming and beating my chest harder than a gorilla! My team rushes towards me, even coach. A few seconds later there is a huge dog pile in the middle of the court. We are on to the playoffs"! His critique let me know that it is relatable which i good to have when writing something so you can ave the readers attention. That is also another reason why I picked it because it was relatable. This shows that I took his critique and put it to use.