English 9 Portfolio
Kyle Ott
Introduction
I enjoy my English class because I enjoy the stories that we read in class and how we discuss them as a class. I also like how we review for vocabulary quizzes, which makes it easy to remember the words. My favorite thing about English class is at the end of a long week when I am done taking a test to begin the period, we have "Free reading Friday", which is a relaxing time when we are able to sit back and read a book of our choice. In this portfolio, you will be able to see how I progressed in my writing throughout the first semester.
My best work
Relating to my Books
One of my best qualities as a writer, or reader, is that I do a good job at relating to my books. This helps me to understand a character's feelings and why he or she may feel that way. This is evident in my first quarter book report below. As you will be able to see in this report, this book was perfect for me as I could relate with my love of football, as well as my head injuries from this past year. It was a challenge for me to summarize such a long book into just a few paragraphs of description. I feel like after thinking through it my report was pretty good.
Describing Action
In my writing continuing a story called "The Most Dangerous Game", I feel like I was able to continue the action of the book. This book was a suspenseful book about a man venturing an unknown island who runs into the only person who lives there. He is an extreme hunter who actually challenges humans. I was able to describe my action in an exciting way. You can view this piece below. This was my favorite story to read and write about because there was a very vivid picture in my head and it was very suspenseful. In my rough draft I had some areas of my story that were vague. However in my polished piece of this story I focused on this and it made my writing much better.
Telling About Myself
In our writing where we wrote about a time where we were disappointed, I felt like I was able to explain how I felt right then and there very well. You can see this experience here in the link below. Sometimes writing about topics that you normally don't talk about or express is nice for a change. This writing allowed me to do this. Some of my thoughts in this writing "floated" around. It was difficult to have an effective order to go by in this writing since it was very personal and almost like a page out of a journal.
Conclusion
My portfolio shows my growth as a writer in my first semester of high school. I improved on using proper punctuation, describing my writing better, and comprehending what I read more efficiently. I give a great amount of effort and it is fair to say that this shows in the grade book. My favorite story was the "Most Dangerous Game" because of all of the action and suspense involved. At first I struggled with understanding stories that didn't interest me, but I have improved in that area and look forward to working on that more next semester. "The Perfect Storm" was difficult to understand, mostly because there were a lot of terms and ships in this story that I was unfamiliar with. However, class discussions that we have help me with stories like this. I am looking forward to our book next semester about Hitler and the Holocaust because I have read books about the same topic and they were interesting. Obviously, I didn't enjoy what Hitler was doing, but it was interesting to here different views on this famous tragedy.