Gabby driessnack
During the beginning of the week, Lydia and I worked on finishing our prezi and making sure everything needed was on there. We put pictures on each slide and focused on what we were going to say. We ended up presenting on Wednesday, not Thursday, which is good because then Lydia did not have to do it by herself. On Thursday and Friday, more people gave their presentations. I thought that it was very interesting to see that people read the same stories, but had different viewpoints about them. Each presentation related the elements of fiction to the literature in different ways, which was cool to see. I thought that everyone in our class did very good, even though I was on a field trip with business management on Thursday and did not get to see those presentations. After giving our presentations, we were asked what we thought that we excelled at personally. This was hard for me to think of, because I did not want to sound cocky and I do not usually dwell on what I did right, but rather what I did wrong. I know that I am very hard on myself so this was a good opportunity to put some positive thoughts into words. I thought both Lydia and I knew what we were talking about and overall did a fine job explaining our two elements of fiction, structure and point of view. xoxo, Gabby
1 Comment
This week, we switched up our SSR books and picked out new ones. My new book is Death Be Not Proud, by John Gunther. I already like this book so much more than my other one. It is about a boy named Johnny, who died of a brain tumor as a teenager. The story goes through Johnny's short-lived life and how he impacted those around him. I have not gotten very far into this book yet, but it is already intriguing and easier to understand than The God of Small Things. I think it was just very hard to keep up with and I did not understand any of the culture references in the book either. This book feels more like an actual story and is particularly interesting to me because I love anything having to do with medicine, since I want to go into nursing. We have also been working hard on our elements of literature presentations, which we will present next week. Our prezi is coming along very well and I think that Lydia and I know a lot about the literature pieces we read and will do well. It took us a while to close read all the stories for our elements of fiction, because some of them were really long. We also had to read them a couple times to pick out all the different elements that corresponded with structure and point of view. After that, we just had to put our presentation together, which is almost done. I really hope that we do not end up having to go on Thursday, because Lydia would have to present by herself since I will be on a field trip to Northwood with my Business Management class. xoxo, Gabby We are spending a lot of time clarifying what exactly we need to do for our projects, because there was a lot of confusing surrounding it. We have been doing close reads on poems, which is taking detailed notes and observations while reading the poem. It helps us break the poem down and understand it easily, but it is very time consuming. I actually have really enjoyed all the poems we read that have for structure and point of view. We still have not made a claim and connected evidence in our poems to the topic of structure or point of view. I think this project will end up being helpful because it gives us practice close reading poems and finding literary elements in poems and stories. I am still a little confused though and I know some of my classmates are too. I just do not really know what the presentation is supposed to look like or be formatted like. Is there a specific outline we are supposed to follow for our presentation or is it completely up to us?
We also did a lot of SSR time this week. I am still struggling a little bit with my book, The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. It jumps around way too much and is very hard to keep up with. All of the names in the book are Indian, so I also struggle with remembering who is who and who does what. To me, a lot of the parts in the book do not make sense. xoxo, Gabby This week, we focused on the poem "Bright Star" by John Keats. At first, this poem kind of confused me, but after we went over it a few times and tried to dig below the surface, it started to make sense to me. We discussed how each of us relates to a character in the poem, the speaker, the speaker's love, or the bright star. Personally, I thought I could relate to the bright star the most because I listen to people's problems a lot. I also am always observing people whether I mean to or not. In the poem, the star does not play a big part, but rather listens and observes from the sidelines. We also got into pairs and worked on a project about literature. We picked two topics about literature and made claims about them after reading a poem. Lydia and I picked structure and point of view. After reading our poems, we wrote about the structure and point of view in the poems and made claims about them. We are going to make a presentation about what we got from the poems and our claims. This week was a little tough because of fog delays and cancellations. This is a website that explains structure in poems and helps you pick it out. http://learn.lexiconic.net/elementsofpoetry.htm xoxo, Gabby This week we focused on the poem, I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, by Emily Dickinson. This is a very deep poem, every time we talked about it, we seemed to find a new meaning. We also looked at imagery in the poem. The types of imagery are visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, organic, tactile, and kinesthetic. We discussed what the speaker might be going through and how the events in the poem can represent what she is mentally experiencing. Imagery is very important in a poem because it helps the reader relate to the context. If the poem is describing a certain smell, it makes it easy for us to imagine that smell too. Explication of a poem can show you specific details that may not have jumped out at you when initially reading it. We also discussed the author of this poem, Emily Dickinson. Emily's poems were found in a drawer and published after she died. None of her poems had names, so they were named the first line of the poem. Although Emily is now dead, a part of her is kept alive because her poems are so deep. It gives you a good idea of who Emily was because her poetry shows such a unique side of herself. This is a good step by step example of how to explicate a poem. https://engl.utoledo.edu/english/?page_id=733 xoxo, Gabby |
Gabby DriessnackSenior at MPHS. Archives
March 2017
Categories |