Life in a Year 8 English classroom with future journalist Angela Tamargo Napolitano
Over the last six weeks we have participated in various narrative workshops to help us write and form ideas for our creative writing. Some of them included speed writing for ideas, writing a six-sentence story to ensure we understand narrative structure, and character brainstorming techniques. We have also started to plan our draft for our final narrative.
At first, I personally was a bit annoyed that we had to do so many workshops because I found them slightly boring. But, later on, when we started to write longer pieces using the structures and techniques that we learned in the workshops, and added language features like alliteration, onomatopoeias and personification the lessons became more enjoyable. We were finally writing properly instead of answering questions and developing ideas.
We’ve also done some of the chapters in ‘Complete English Basics’ to develop our English skills. We’ve done some reading comprehension activities and we were shown what we would have to do in order to get an A grade; learning the different elements of what makes up a good response. We have also found definitions and taken notes to improve our vocabulary.
My favourite task is reading the novel ‘Skellig’ and filling in the character inference chart. So far, the ‘Skellig’ task has left me the most curious as we haven’t finished it yet, and the book is very interesting and has bucket loads of suspense. I really want to know more about the character Skellig because he is very mysterious and secretive. I also want to find out what sort of creature he is because I don’t think that he’s human but I think that he might be some type of man-beast. I would also like to do different tasks than the ones that we are currently doing. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind the character inference chart, but I can’t wait to dig my hands into something new and to learn more about it as reading is one of my hobbies, and because we have already done one.
I have helped my friends in class by reminding them of the homework when they forgot, and they have done the same for me. But, this hasn’t really happened very often as we have to write ALL of our homework tasks in our diaries. And, it is also on SETQA so our parents can see it on their SEQTA Engage app; on the dashboard!
