The past two years have been fun, especially in English. Last year all of our writing was done on paper. Now, in 8th grade, we learned to use our writing skills to write blogs about work we’ve done in class. We even participated in a blog contest. I am writing this blog post to talk about an upcoming even for FLAGS, Portfolio Night. This happens towards the end of the year, where everyone gets dressed really nice and presents what they have done this year in each class (except P.E.) and how they have improved now. I chose the “Monsters/Rosewood Common Themes” and the ” ‘Flowers for Algernon’ Blog Post” because I really liked doing these assignments.

My 7th grade artifact is the “Monsters/Rosewood Common Themes” assignment. In this assignment, we found themes that showed up in both the “The Rosewood Incident” and “Monsters are Due on Maple Street”. One of the themes I created was think before you act. The one annotation i made was that was good at finding common themes between two stories. I think at the time I was bad at working with the group but, I have definitely improved upon that. The FLAGS Learning Outcome I used in this assignment was Critical and Creative thinker because you really had to think hard to figure out the different themes.

My 8th grade artifact is the “Flowers for Algernon” Blog Post. In this assignment, we had to write a summary of the book “Flowers for Algernon”. After we wrote our summary, we posted it to Edublog’s so that everyone in 8th Grade Flags could see it. The first annotation I made was that I did really good at writing my summary. The second was that I didn’t do very well at my conclusion. The FLAGS Learning Outcome I used in this assignment was Technologically adept because we learned how to create a blog post and used that knowledge to write and post our summary on edublogs.com.

It is hard to see that I have, but I have definitely become a better writer since 7th grade because at the time, I always had a hard time writing summary’s. But now it is easier because I tend to pay attention to smaller details which really help me understand the text I am writing about. I think my weakness now in 8th grade is finding good evidence to prove my point.