English class for me has been very informative and eye opening these past two years I have been in FLAGS. I learned so much and fixed so many mistakes, over all improving on my literary english skills. I am writing this blog post as a basic reflection of my English class for the FLAGS program, and a review of the assignments I chose to talk about for portfolio night. The first assignment I chose to do is the story of ‘Flowers for Algernon’ which we did for first semester and I chose this because I had fun with the activities that revolved around the story. The second assignment I chose was the text of ‘Lesson of the Moth’ for second semester, and that was because I enjoyed reading and annotating this story and the theme of it really caught on to me.
The story of Flowers for Algernon was a story about a man named Charlie who was mentally challenged and wanted to be smart so we saw a doctor and volunteered to be an experiment. We did this lesson so we can start the semester and to start with writing online blogs. I remember the story being read too by a narrator, Charlie, and his journey to becoming smart and the events happening around him by his journal. While he wasn’t too smart, his job employees were rude too him but he was oblivious to it and he didn’t know until he became smart. When he became smart he realized what was really happening in his life. When we were done reading the story we wrote a blog about the lesson of the story and I wrote about how it is not good to be rude to the mentally disabled. I think the message of the story is really important and I like how it was a way of introducing us to write blogs. This has helped me be Technology Adept because I learnt how to use online blogs to express themes of stories.

The other assignment I chose to do is ‘Lesson of the Moth’, which is a poem. We did this lesson because we learnt poetry strategies and had us go over metaphors and personification. I chose to talk about this assignment because it was one of my favorite things to do for English, simply because of the theme and what we did to analyze the poem. The story was about a moth who wanted to burn itself and it was told by a cockroaches point of view, with the moth telling it that it is better to live a short life of adventure and risks than living a long life safe and simply, before setting itself on fire. How we did to better understand the poem and what was happening was to do illustrations of the events that was happening by each stanza. This better helped with being a Critical and Creative thinker because I learned stragedies to analyze a poem.

I have improved as a writer between 7th and 8th grade, because I take what I know in 7th grade and input it to what I have to do for 8th grade, and I will continue to do so. From my mistakes in 7th grade, I try to focus on making it better going on to 8th grade. I will still have weaknesses in 8th grade like trying to figure out what informational texts are trying to tell me and sometimes hard to find evidence for arguments. And when writing sometimes I tend to miss use phrases and transitions. For high school, I can improve by practicing my English skills and try to focus more on the skills that are my weaknesses.