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.
