Self Reflection

Language Arts

 

My main growth in Language Arts this year is self-reflection. I’ve made this growth through the This I Believe project. In this project we individually wrote narrative essays on our core belief. A narrative essay is focused on a belief about society or life that is essential to the writer. This is different than other writing narratives such as memoirs. To go along with our narrative essay we constructed a tile in which we drew a symbol that displayed our belief.  My core belief related to music so I drew a radio for my tile. Then everyone recorded themselves reading their essay. I think that the purpose of this project was to learn more about ourselves and discover more than we already knew.

 

To create this essay I first had to complete several prompts to get me thinking about what my core belief actually was. A core belief is basically, what all of your beliefs are based off of or stem from. It was my thesis, or opinion, about life. After I decided on what my core belief was I made a brainstorming sheet that answered various questions. This helped me to understand what I should include in my essay and what stories in my life represent my belief. The requirements of the essay was to have our core belief threaded through the essay, show personal reflection, have an interesting hook, have correct grammar/ punctuation, and have under 500 words. On our first try nobody got a perfect score, so we revised and did another draft. We revised through the feedback we got from our peers and teachers. We used this feedback to better our work so that we could have a more thorough and professional essay.

 

It was very hard to find my core belief at first. I had so many ideas of things that I believed in, but I needed to find my core belief. This is where I grew in self-reflection. It took a lot of time to just think about myself. This is what it took for me to know myself better and to show it in my writing. I had to learn how to dig deep and really ask myself why do I believe this? What impact does it have on my life? When I figured out that my core belief was in music, I made a brainstorming sheet to organize my thoughts on my belief. This helped me to understand my belief even more and help me to create an essay that was very personal to me.

 

In our journaling, we completed about six prompts that got our mind thinking about our beliefs. Prompts are just questions that help you to start to think about an idea. Some of the prompts where, what do you distinguish as right and wrong? Who is your role model? These prompted my self-reflection on my core belief. In my brainstorming page, I made a graphic organizer of different questions related to my belief after I decided on what it was. This helped me to filter my thoughts onto a paper. This brainstorming sheet helped me majorly on writing my essay.

 

My essay contained a thesis or an opinion about society. This thesis was my core belief. I learned that a core belief has no limits. When it’s your opinion, you are not right or wrong because it’s what you think. This is what I discovered through this process in my Language Arts class. This gave me the freedom to express my core belief in my narrative essay. 

Meanwhile I constructed tiles that had symbols to represent my belief in music. This also took a lot of revision to meet the requirements. The requirements were to have no clique images, colors that represent the mood if the belief (and a limited color palate), good craftsmanship and that it is clear what our belief is through the symbol.

To find the idea of a radio for my tile I had to do even more self-reflection. I had to understand where music has helped me through life the most. I first thought of earbuds and headphones. Then I thought of the piano. I eventually learned that music reaches me the most when I listen to it in the car. This is where I realized that the radio is my main source of music that impacted my life the most. I believe that this helped me to make a successful final draft because it was personal to my experience with music.

 

            One thing that our tile showed was symbolism. I learned through making the tile, that to symbolize an idea, I have to first make a picture that “spoke” the words that related to my belief. A symbol is something that illustrates an idea without using words. I like that we used symbol to summarize our essays. It was easy to tell what our belief was about through our tile without reading the essay. Symbols are a good way to convey an essay and one little picture. This is another thing that I learned in the process of making my tile.

 

            I think that I will be able to use this quality in the future when I make personal writings in high school and college or in my career if I become an inspirational writer. Using self-reflection can help me to share my experiences with others that are dealing with the same situation. I hope to better myself in this quality because it will help me in the future to know who I am. If I know who I am, I can better my weakness through my strengths. Having the ability to better myself by improving my weaknesses will help me to succeed in high school and my future career