Thursday 14 June 2012

Final Thoughts of my Creative Writing Class



You are about to read my final thoughts on the overall experience of the grade 12 Creative Writing class.

First off, my favourite assignment was The Buried Life (TBL) project. I enjoyed thinking deep about what I wanted to accomplish throughout my life, before I died and creating a bucket list. I also enjoyed that, how we presented the project was up to us. I found it a challenging project, because creating a bucket list isn’t as easy as one would think. Another challenging part was creating 25 visuals, because I wanted to use only pictures I had personally taken. I found the time given to work on the project was the perfect amount.

My least favourite project was The Moment. I didn’t enjoy the moment, because we spent quite a long time on the project. After a while I got annoyed of re-reading my work over and over. It’s hard to correct your own work especially if it’s personal. My moment was very personally and I felt like I was reliving the moment every time I worked on it, which brought up a lot of emotion.

Friday Reading class was something I looked forward to weekly. I love reading and to have an hour to read is something I don’t have much time to do on my own! It was an added bonus to be able to check out a book from the classroom library! The classroom library allowed me to read books I have always wanted to read!

Monday written reflections was an assignment that I found easy to accomplish. I liked expressing my feelings on class tasks and projects. During my written reflections, I usually set goals for the upcoming week, which helped in the long run. I liked how we posted all our reflections on our blog. I loved receiving comments from fellow classmates on my reading reflections, because each one expressed their opinions on the same book I just blogged about!

Personally, I found the Writing Reflection Notebook (WRN) not very useful to me. We did use it at times, but I found myself spending more time on my blog. At first, I used the WRN for personal additions, but when I understood what personal additions were I posted them straight onto my blog! Also, most of our tasks that were started in our WRN were later added onto our blog. I found that I only really used my WRN for notes and marking down the books I read.


Having a blog was definitely the highlight of the class! I got really into adding personal additions, maintaining my blog, and posting assignments. Having a blog was a very good way to incorporate technology into the classroom, because kids our age use it daily. I found myself always bringing up my blog in conversations and showing my friends! I enjoyed the classes were Digital Yoda introduced ways to spruce up our blogs! Having a blog, to me was personal and something I found myself checking as much as I do with Facebook.

Having a Twitter account wasn’t something I got into, because I felt uncomfortable when I tweeted. For example, tweeting our bucket lists @theburiedlife made me feel uncomfortable, since we were to tweet them for every tweeted bucket list item. I did enjoy tweeting our reading and writing reflections though, because it expressed my thoughts in little words.

The integration of technology into the classroom was very amusing! Having a blog and twitter account was something I wouldn’t have created without this class. I use technology every day and using it in the classroom was refreshing! When I say refreshing I mean it was different from just writing everything down on papers and poster boards.

I learnt that I am someone who enjoys blogging and creating very creative pieces of work. I enjoyed the listography, blackout poetry, and TBL assignments, because it all involved art. I consider colouring, drawing, and taking pictures forms of art. I also learnt that I lose interest in books about serious events, for example a million little pieces. I just find serious books take me a while to finish.

Definitely have your students create blogs again, because I loved using blogger! Creative Writing was one of my favourite classes this term.

My advice for future students of CW is too not get behind in personal additions. I found it easy to post two a week and that was a good thing, because some students are finding it difficult to get 20 - 30 posted in the last week of school.

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