Out of all our projects, I enjoyed the creative ones the most. I could relate to them the most and write freely. Poetry was my favorite, and I was able to compose poems to my own liking.
Poetry Unit (Shel Silverstein)
The poetry unit was my favourite project this whole year. It also ended up being quite emotional and incredibly nostalgic. I was going to be able to write my own poetry and study a poet of my choice! Just the idea of the unit filled me with so much happiness and excitement. We had to choose a person to base our poetic structures off of and I chose Shel Silverstein. He’s an author who I’ve been reading since I was four and to this day he is still one of my favourite poets. When I got home I actually ran right to my room and tore up my bookshelf looking for works of his that we might’ve had. Turned out we did, though most of them are currently in storage. I was able to reread poems that used to freak me out when I was younger (because of the drawings) without flinching. I went back through our (reaaallly old) computer and found documents filled with poems that I had written at age seven, all inspired from Shel Silverstein. One thing that got me was when I reread The Giving Tree, a story that I’ve had my whole life and would read all the time. As a child I had read it so much that I had memorized the whole thing word by word but eventually it faded away. Writing the poetry wasn’t hard. For as long as I can remember, drawing and writing poems were things I’d do in my freetime and writing these poems were fun and easy. I can write so that I can relate to my poems and I don’t spend hours trying to make it perfect. I even did some research and found the font that he had used in his stories- Rockwell - and used it. I tend to put rhymes into my works naturally and here I was able to do that because of Shel.
Biographical Narrative (ft. my Dad!)
This project was a lot of fun for me. I enjoyed getting to know my father more and interviewing him. I felt like it was a good way to connect. (Though kinda felt a bit bad that it was only because of a school project). As he told me his stories I could see them unfolding and he even showed me a book based off of the place he had gone to for camping. Writing the story was exciting and I wrote it swiftly without trouble. I’ve never typed so fast in my life, I was on an actual typing spree. I loved this a lot because I got so much writing freedom and really wish we could’ve done more assignments of the sort.
Speech Analysis (Sherlock)
“ELEMENTARY, MY DEAR WATSON.” The famous quote which ironically only appeared once in the whole show but everyone ignores because the show is genius. I spent so much time trying to figure out what scene I wanted to do because I have so many favourites like Sherlock at the Buckingham Palace, the Restaurant scene, Sherlock and Watson’s first meeting, but I finally settled on his death scene. It was something that struck me hard during the show and left me wondering ‘okay, what did he do now? What’s the joke behind it?’ So I did my analysis on it. And it was so much fun. I think I rewatched the scene so many times that I now have it memorized. For such a short scene and such a small project, I believe I was able to bring out some of my best writing during this assignment.