When I first began 7th grade I came in not knowing what to expect learning about in english. I have been put through a series of concepts learning about different concepts such as analyzing, annotating, looking for evidence to supprt my claim, and more. My overrall experience has been extremely beneficial but, difficult at the same time. At first, I made spelling errors, did not know how to use transitions, or how to create a counterargument. Now I can do all of this, although I may not enjoy it all the time, but it has been fun knowing I have developed different skill levels. I am writing this blog post to show how much I have grown since seventh grade. The assigments I am going to be choosing is called “The Murder Mystery” from sevenrh grade and “The Lesson of the Moth” blog post from eighth grade year. I wanted to choose the “Murder Mystery” because it was one of the first essays I wrote as a middle schooler and there were many things I couldn’t to back them that I can do know, such as, using evidence and creating an argument. My skills are demonstrated in “The Lesson of the Moth” because comparing these two show my growth.

At the beginning of my seventh grade year one of the assignments we began with was called “Murder Mystery” where we analyzed an image of the inside of the house with a man was laying dead on the floor and using only the clues in the picture we had to decided whether it was a murder or a suicide. Once we had our opinion we had to write an essay providing evidence for our claim, in this case, I thought it was a murder judging by how to the room looks… Messy. Looking back at my essay I realized that even today I am still having trouble analyzing events, connections, ideas, and more because sometimes I would look for evidence, and if I did not find any, I never really stopped to think about what each item or text meant. Although this demonstrated that I can use different points of view by characters and have different emotions when describing the situation. I was able to an effective communicator because when I read the excerpt that went with it and analyzed the image for clues I was able to have an opinion about the situation and provided an argument by using evidence from both image and excerpt. One of my weaknesses from when I was in 7 grade was the lack of using transitions because I always began with the same ones such as, “The first reason, the second reason, lastly” and so on. I also repeated the same sentences or using precise words and phrases. Some of my strengths include inferring and analyze evidence and the text and presenting them in a logical order so I can show how each piece of evidence led up to the murder.

At the start of eighth grade our whole school became familiar with creating blogs for different concepts the class learned. In order to complete this task we read a poem called “The Lesson of the Moth” by Don Marquis which was about a moth and a cockroach having an conversation about how they should take a perspective on life, the moth believes life is about taking a risk and the cockroach believes you should be safe to live longer. We then had to explain each point of view and also explain what we think in a blog post. My claim was that I can live both on the safe and risky side because I want to live longer but, I also want to do things that I am going to remember and have fun not a boring life. I was able to be a critical and creative thinker because I was able to make connections to my own life regarding my perspective, I was also able to connect different risks depending on how the characters decided if life should be risky or safe. Currently, as an eighth grader I have developed many strengths some which include determining the authors points of views, determine the central idea, evaluate and describe claims using evidence. As mentioned earlier I have improved on my 7 grade weaknesses because I am now better at using transitions, I have improved entirely in run on sentences, and I now look closely at what each line or example means. I also have improved entirely on checking on my writing. I made 26 typos and in 8 grade I only made about 5-6. I now know when I should use ceratin evidence and when I shouldn’t.

One weakness I have this year is looking at a paragraph at a text and finding out literary forms and finding out the main idea because sometimes if I do not fully understand it, I can’t break down parts of it to find the purpose. I can improve on this in high school because I can use what I know to find out different meanings. I can also improve for high school by doing practice problems, because the more I learn the more I understand it.