Reflection

When I first heard of this project, many questions arose in my mind, but thanks to the help of my teacher's and friends, I was off to a solid start. I was happy that it was going to be another blog project, because I enjoyed the last blog project a lot. There were also some challenges that I faced, but due to those challenges, I learned new thing and improved on some of my skills that I learned this year. This project really made me exercise all of the skills that I learned and am supposed to master by eighth grade. My favorite posts were the game, the advertisement, and the poem, because I really enjoyed working on them.

As usual, I had many questions to ask at the beginning of this project. At first, I wondered things like, "What questions have to be answered in my posts?" especially since the posts on the humanities blog did not answer my question. However, I was later informed that it doesn't matter what information you display, as long as it is relevant and doesn't repeat itself. The most important question that I had though was what my topic should be. I gave this question careful thought, because I wanted to choose something that I was interested in, but not something that had too little information. In the end, I chose the Louisiana Purchase, because I wanted to learn more about where it put The United States of America financially and how it affected our power as a growing nation.

When I heard that the final project of the year was going to be a blog project, I was pretty happy. The reason that I enjoy working on blog projects is that they make me become better at using the Internet, which is a skill that I could improve on. Also, I lose that stress that if I mess up on something, or write something incorrectly, I will miss it. Spell and grammar check makes me feel much safer when writing my work, even though I could have used this on some of my previous projects. I will try to get better at using computers to find and create information!

Like my projects before, I faced some problems. First of all, I found a lot of typos in my work when I started running it by Microsoft Word, (which I really thank) but that was not my biggest problem. Then, my first play had almost no information at all, and whatever information it had was either repeated or was an opinion. After a while though, I was able to change it into something more interesting that also gave some new information. Finally, some of my information repeats in posts, which means that I have to improve on spreading out my information.

This project really made me use a lot of the skills that I learned this year, from synthesizing information to citing sources. This really makes me think of how many standards have been addressed throughout the whole year. Also, now that I have learned how to properly cite sources, I feel confident that my bibliography will turn out correct this time around! If it doesn't turn out as planned, then that just tells me that I will have to give some more time to practicing writing bibliographies.

I had a great time creating my advertisement, my poem, and my game. Since I enjoy persuasive writing and convincing people, I knew that an advertisement would definitely be one of my ten genres. Of course, it was kind of tricky coming up with an advertisement for the Louisiana Territory, but the challenge drove me to complete it. Poetry is something that I have improved on a lot thanks to the slavery project that came just a little while earlier. Keeping my poetry skills is something that I wanted to do, so I decided to make a poem one of my ten genres. My game was fun to make and required some imagination, because I never thought that I would use polls to create trivia! Nevertheless, it ended up doing pretty well!

In the end, I feel as if I have taken away something important from this project, something that will help me in the future and when I move up to eighth grade. I am proud of what I have done, even if it is not perfect. I had a great time working on this project and will remember it for a long time to come!