Writing in more detail

Language Arts

           In the 7th grade, I have grown on Language Arts a lot. There are a lot of areas that I grew in like fluency and reading, but I am going to talk about the writing. The purpose of this reflection is to show my growth in Language Arts, and to showcase some of my projects that we did here. We did a lot of writing from the start, and I can see the growth from comparing the beginning of the year and the end of the year. We did different types of writing for different audiences (children, adults, etc.). I have gotten skilled at writing. By skilled, I mean that my writing has gotten faster, and it make more sense. It is easier for me to write detailed explanations. The writing journals also helped me because I practiced writing almost every day, and could write about any prompt I got. The professional email was focused on being very professional, and was being emailed to business partners, so it had to impress them.

          The first artifact I am going to share with you is the notebook entries. In notebook entries, we have to write about a specific prompt in 10 minutes. These prompts include writing about quotes, pictures, and poems. We do this so that we get better at writing by practicing writing frequently. So far, we have done 30 journal entries. We do them in our Language Arts composition books, in which we also collect quotes. The prompts are sometimes very challenging to write about, so you have to think a lot about it. This helps you because you will be prepared to write about anything you want. There is versatility in what we write about. I have grown a lot in writing because as you can see, my first entry is only 11 lines. But as you see the later prompts, you can see the writing getting more and more, at one point it is 20 lines. The purpose of the book is to show the progression of your ability to write.

         The second artifact I am going to share with you is the professional emailing for the storybook project. We had to email a proposal to Main Elementary to accept our storybook. The reader was an adult, so we had to make it formal. We learned what formal and informal writing was and we learned when to use it. The email, in the end, was completed and Main Elementary agreed to take our book. The email was formatted like a letter. In the email we talked about what the storybook project was about, and why we wanted to give the book to them. Formal writing is a form of writing that is very specific and uses proper language which is professional. Informal writing is a form of writing which is unprofessional, and is meant to be used among friends. Now I know when and how to use formal and informal writing.

          Language Arts is where most of the critical thinking skills are taught, and I have learned how to read and write critically. Language Arts has helped me in other classes like science, because we write a lot of claim, evidence, and reasoning. This will help me next year because we will be asked to write even more long essays. This will help me in the future because I will constantly have to write for different reasons, because you need to know how to read and write to get a job. When I have a job, I will have to use the formal language because people around me will be expecting me to be clear, detailed, and professional. Language Arts has helped me do this.