daph daph’s blog

Time flies! This is the tenth week of school already!
Half way of the semester, which also means it’s the time for midterms =(
It has been a really busy and tiring week. While studying for midterm we still had lots of different kinds of work to do.

I really should put more effort in my base words these weeks. My grades has been dropping, while it is one of the easiest grades to get as long as I study.

Our final draft for oral history was due this week too. I was pretty bad at following the instructions though. Didn’t really used much time to revise it after my first draft =( I shall do better when I hand back my corrections!

From our textbooks, we learned more about nouns and adverbs. We also did some exercise in class. It was much more challenging. We had to combine all we’ve learned to complete the questions. Preposition and conjunctions were new for this week. Still, more practice shall be done before we reach perfect.

We also read vignettes this week. Vignettes are short stories but without conclusions. It contains a lot of showing instead of telling. We also had to write a chart to show our understanding of this story. By this it also helped me learn more about showing versus telling. Furthermore, we’re even writing our own vignettes!
While there are many ways to write a vignette, we were told to collect pictures and make them into a story later on. It seems challenging, it will need a lot of imagination for sure. However, it is something new to me and it seems very interesting and fun at the same time =)

This week was a bit more special than the others =)

We had to make up our base word tests because we were all absent at camp last week. So there were two base word tests for this week.

Wednesday was Halloween!! Almost everyone dressed up in their costumes. We were told to wear it to school and to classes. And so we were all in our costumes taking expository writing. It was funny how everyone had classes in their costumes, but it was a lot of fun for sure =D

Furthermore, we had more practice on the pronouns, adjectives and the nouns.

After that, we moved onto the verbs. This time our goal was to differentiate the verb as n linking or action and intransitive or transitive.

We also read a story from our textbook. It was a pretty sad story. The author had great writing skills. He used a lot of showing instead of telling. His writing has a lot of skills that I should learn from.

We’ve also had more discussion and progress on our newsletter. Hopefully it can be sent to publish by next week.

We are also to send mails requesting for applications since we are all seniors and juniors now. Therefore, we have to start preparing for our universities and for our application essays.

We had a different kind of base word test this week. Instead of filling in the blanks we had multiple choices. We started to learn Greek and Latin roots as well.

As base words increases each week, sometimes I didn’t do as well as how I usually do on the tests. So I think I shall put in more time and study harder!

This week we moved onto the nouns, pronouns, and adjectives. Our goal is to identify the words which represent any of them. It is pretty tricky to identify between the pronouns and the adjective sometimes. Common, concrete, collective and compound took me some time to figure it out too.

Which articles are going to put in the news letter are decided! I think just within one or two more weeks our first challenging news letter project will be published!

Finally, our main project for this week is the oral history interview. I spent some time to think of a nice topic. It was actually pretty fun to interview some one! This assignment is kind of new to me. Although I spent some time to understand what and how to do this assignment but I found it quite interesting. It’s due next Monday and I hope my story would interest people!

There was no class during week eight!!
We all went to leadership camp and it was great fun =D
Lots of exercise, the food was great! I had lots of fun for sure!

Writing our journals have always been the first thing to do before we start each class of expository writing. Base words are also a part of our lives now. Oh, and I should also make my learning log one of them too! I believe after a while when we look back to these works, we will realize how much we’ve grown and how much we’ve learned.

We also talked a bit more about the principles of capitalization and had more practice with it. After these several weeks of capitalization practice, I think I have truly understand the rules for using them.

October 10 was a day off for us because of our National Day =D It’s always nice to have a day off to either relax or catch up with our works. I saw lots of people going to the firework from the news. The television also displayed the fireworks as well! Although I didn’t really do anything special that day, in fact I actually stayed at home all day, I thought it was a nice day to relax a bit =)

After relaxation we need to start working hard again. News letter was another big job for this week. To compose a news letter wasn’t as easy as how I thought it would be. Without the elements, which are the articles from the reporters, our news letter is unable to complete and send out for publishing. Therefore we all had to came up with a topic and write a paragraph about it!

After working on our reflective essay for several weeks, we finally handed in our final work.

However, I was pretty disappointed about what I got on my reflective essay. I actually thought I did a good job, but eventually I need more practice and be more careful on my grammar. I hope I can do better and have huge improvements on my next assignment =)

News letter was another challenge for this week. Patricia and I both chose to be publishers for the news letter. Our responsibility for the project was to compose and find out the prices to publish our news letter.

As usual, every week we learn a several more base words and every Monday was still our base word test. It wasn’t too bad, but still I’ve got space to improve too.

As we are in 11th grade right now, it is the year for us to start taking the SAT tests and starting to know how to write an application essay. Therefore, writing an application essay was another assignment for this week too.

Furthermore, we were split into groups to make a presentation. Our group was to present about Mesopotamia. We stayed after school on Friday before the Moon Festival break. The presentation was delayed so we had more time to prepare and make our presentation better! Our group were all proud about what we had done, but we actually felt disappointing when we knew it wasn’t counted as a grade since most of us put a lot of effort in the project.

It has been two weeks from the first day of school already, and here’s what I’ve learned in expository writing class so far.

There are millions of vocabulary in each language, just like English, it’s impossible for us to know every one of them. However, if we learn the base words, even though we might not know the word but we will still be able to guess what it means and there will be a great opportunity that we would get the correct meaning of the word. Therefore, we have already learned 20 base words that are really helpful. I believe that instead of memorizing all the vocabularies, if we learn the base words and know how to use them, there will be a great improvement in our reading skills and in the language.

I’ve also learned the way of writing an essay, especially an reflective essay. There are four process in writing, which are prewriting, writing(drafting), revising and publishing. Each of them has a broad knowledge to learn from. It is also important to write an interesting essay that catches peoples attention, therefore, showing versus telling was something we learned during these past two weeks as well. Furthermore, writing an essay with zero capitalization mistakes is even more important, by practicing with the given worksheets, I’ve comprehend the rules of using capitalization and reminded myself some parts that are easy forgotten to add an capital.

Looking forward to the third week of class! and that’s about what I’ve learned in the past two weeks