2nd last March blog

This week I have:

• Worked on my Spanish presentation
• Completing talking assessments for Comms
• Researching possible history questions for my personal essay
• Reading "The Heart of Darkness"
• Trying to find a short story or poem I can write about for Lits
• Revised Spanish conjugations

Good and bad things about these tasks were:

Spanish: I enjoyed coming up with a topic I wanted to talk about. It has been great practise with my speaking. I have also realised a few things that I forgot in Spanish and have revised them. It has been quite hard to spread myself evenly though. I enjoy writing stories in Spanish very much, so tend not to work on my listening as often as I write. This week I will try to concentrate on all of the relevant areas evenly.

Comms: I am three quarters of the way through the assessments using programmes. I have found this interesting because it shows clearly how different people choose to present themselves using varied tone of voice, body language, and speed of voice. It has shown me that this all makes a slight difference. I found the Al Gore documentary slightly more difficult to assess because I found him quite confusing. But eventually I learned to look at it objectively and not emotionally. I am used to watching a TV program without much thought to the reasoning behind every detail. It was really interesting to observe his methods closely. I find myself being able to assess speakers and TV programmes a little differently now!

History: Researching an essay question for history is actually quite hard. I have so many periods in history that I find so interesting but that would not quite be as suitable to assess as others are. So I've begun to be objective and compromise between finding a subject I feel real passion for and one that a good argument can be created around. I am narrowing down the search. So this Friday I want to be able to show Evan some examples of questions I'm interested in and see what he thinks. Until then, I want to take his advise and read as much as possible on the subjects to find suitable candidates.

Lits: Ok finishing "The Heart of Darkness" seemed like an impossible task at first. However I've now really gotten into the story and the literary techniques. So much so that I'm thinking of doing something quite challenging for my Lits personal reflection essay. I have been thinking of doing "To Kill a Mocking Bird" which is one of my favourite books. This week I will discuss that with Madeleine and find out her opinion on the book. Just out of interest I will research other good short stories as a back up. This unit has given me confidence in my writing. It's made me consider that perhaps writing a book one day would be quite enjoyable.

So this coming week I have some organisation to do and have to make sure I spread myself evenly and give myself enough time to do what I want to do. This is good practise for the final weeks of the course where we will be in the same situation. I've realised after getting quite stressed with balancing study, family things and a relationship that being disciplined is the only way to get through things efficiently. I have learned to cull time wasting parts of my life and just get into what I want to achieve.

Nuevo blog

This week I completed my target of sticking to my SMART target for Jordi.
I have chosen to concentrate on passing my NABs for Spanish.

So this week I intended to practise my listening skills and complete exercises on what I had listened to. In addition to this I have been revising my Spanish notes on cities, family and people and how to describe them. I have been making sure I test myself on each of these subjects to see how am I doing and continuing until I have memorised words better. I am finding this technique of testing myself and then repeating exercises on what I have revised has worked quite well.

For Literature I intended to read more of the book: "The Heart of Darkness" which in actual fact Madeleine asked us to read more of. I have made more of an effort to concentrate more while reading the book to ensure that I am understanding the more subtle meanings of the words. Each day after Spanish I make sure I find a quiet place to read without any distractions and read for at least half an hour. This is difficult at first, eventually though I find it hard to tear myself away.

Next week I am going to make sure that I have completed more talking exercises for Scott. The exercises/assessments are to watch an example of a speaker and analyse objectively how well they get their point across, their style and use of visual aids. I will aim to complete two of these by next week and to learn from the exercise how to better get my point across while talking.

Also I want to be ready for the Spanish speaking test by continuing to revise my old notes and listening to Spanish. I will do this by completing exercises on the subjects covered in the past and by working on what I will talk about to help improve my pronounciation. I will see the results of this by hopefully improving on my vocabulary and passing the NAB.

wc 8th March

This week I was good at studying Spanish regularly. With Jordi I have been completing a SMART target every week in order to complete one goal-to pass my Spanish NABs. Doing this has meant that I have a task everyday to do with Spanish. So everyday I have either listened, read or practised speaking Spanish. Each day I have completed my task and measured how well it is going by testing myself on what I have covered. If I found that I couldn't answer something I could spend more time on it.

This week I could have done more practise on literary techniques. Although despite this I have begun to read the book given to us- "The Heart of Darkness" which has helped to increase my knowledge of techniques. This week I want to spend more time reading the book, reading through short stories that I may like to analyse for a later assessment and to complete the reading assessment sucessfully. I feel confident in this because I have done a lot of practise in past weeks. However I want to make an effort to have increased the amount I'm reading for Lits by next week.

A blog..in more detail....

Spanish
This week I have realised that keeping up regular Spanish revision has helped me to memorise a lot more information than before.
Reading and listening to Spanish has helped me to pick up more and more words and structure.
I realised this when completing exercises and reading from my Spanish book. The more work I do, the more I can make sense of my book and the easier the exercises get.
I need to constantly test myself to see how much I know.

Comms
Preparation with Bill and Paul has begun on our formal meeting assessment. We have an interesting topic and there is plenty of information available about the topic. I enjoy their company and we are making sure we keep communicating about what we will do. I have enjoyed working in a group. It has given me a bit more flexibility.

History
History class is off for the next two weeks. We have been given the task of some research at home in order to cover what we might have in class. I enjoy history so this is no problem for me.
Independant investigation has helped my research skills become a lot stronger.

Literature
For literature class I have been doing some practice at home of the techniques involved in analysing texts. This has really helped because this subject seems to need deep concentration. Literary techniques are sometimes like another language. I found whilst answering questions on a poem given out in class, my mind seemed to open up a little and I feel the practice helped me understand the poem on a much deeper level. Before I may not have enjoyed the poem or others like it as much. But now I find that the more work I do on the techniques of a piece of writing, the more I understand the writer's intention in using it. It's amazing!

Study Skills
In doing this blog and attending study skills class I've found that reflection is needed to show yourself how you've progressed. Writing a blog is not something I would usually do and when you feel a lot for what your doing it's easy to add more to the blog about your feelings rather than be objective about yourself and your learning. However the blog writing means that you look at exactly what has happened in the past week, the benefits it has given you or not and things that could be improved.

All in all, I have enjoyed beginnings new projects, can't wait to move onto more difficult tasks, but also I intend to spread myself more evenly on all of my subjects. I will continue working on Spanish everyday, perhaps pushing myself further to vary my study of Spanish in the areas of: listening, speaking, reading.