Reading

I think that I have grown tremendously in reading this year. I read more books throughout the year than I did my last academic year and these books would include Lord of the Flies, Marley and Me, We Were Liars, The Pregnancy Project, Purple Hibiscus, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. One area that I think I excelled in was my reading time. Last year I was a pretty slow reader, but this year that changed. Since we had to read a book in class while also outside of class at the same time, I learned to read my personal book faster so that I would have time to carefully read my assigned book. I think that I have also advanced in my note taking. Last year, my annotating was average, but I didn’t fully understand what key things I should make notes on. This year, my annotating is very in depth and shows my understanding of the novel. One reason for this is using different colored pens. This helps break up different parts of the book so that it makes sense altogether. See the attached image below to see how my annotation looked this year during Lord of the Flies. My final area of significant improvement is being able to connect and relate the important events in the book. Last year, this was a difficult thing for me to do, but now I am able to read a book and look for repeating events that could relate to a character, symbol, or theme. One piece of evidence that clearly shows this is my project from Purple Hibiscus. In this project, I carefully picked quotes that related back to a key theme as I read the novel. See the attached picture of my Purple Hibiscus project.