Reflective journal week 5

Aaah Spanish, is there enough time in the day to learn what I want! Getting there though. I have learned I want to work more on speaking, listening is the easiest part for me, but thinking in Spanish of what I want to say, constructing sentences, writing, and speaking take a good bit longer. I have learnt that writing things down really helps me, if I'm trying to really learn something I just keep doing written exercises with it. I'm going to start listening to Spanish more also. As Alicia says I should revise the handouts everyday before moving on to new things. She gave great encouragement and I really feel like I can do this if I apply myself. Learning two new words everyday is reasonable to do and as she says it all adds up!!

In Literature class, we handed in our essays on the poem 'Valentine.' I really enjoyed doing this, I had to cut my essay in half because I doubled the word count! I learned from this that the main work in writing an essay is the organisation and work you do before hand. I spent hours making notes and trying to put it in order to make sense. Writing it up was easy after that. I bought a book on literary terms and re-read the poem several times using this. It was really interesting noticing techniques used and sort of getting what the writer was trying to convey.

For our Investigating Europe class, I had a subject to study chosen. That was the variety of cultures in Spain. I decided this was too wide a subject to try to fit into 2500 words and a 3/4 minute talk. It's sooo varied!! So I chose one area of Spain I've always been interested in- Andalucia and the Moors effect on the culture of the area. I'm finding loads of great books on this, my next challenge is to find somebody to interview about it. Maybe a field trip to sunny Andalucia!!! So I learned that I need to be organised in this, and create a plan of action to use the time I have well. The 7th of December is not that far away really! I learned that mind mapping and elimination helps in making decisions sometimes and clear thinking.

I really enjoyed Communications class this week. We analyzed a Scotsman article which was arguing the case for animal testing. Something which obviously provokes feelings of some kind. We looked at the points made and what exactly the writer was trying to say, and how exactly he was doing that. I thought it was interesting how much he was trying to sway us arguing one side of things. In reading newspaper articles since this I find it's so common, the articles are so opinionated. I learned to put my feelings aside when analyzing a text to try and empathise with what the writers points and opinions were.