Introduction
The book of us is an anthology of nonfiction writing pieces, written by us students in the Patton/Soler team, the expectations for The Book of Us writing pieces are supposed to be the best we have ever created. We had to go through several daily peer critique sessions with different students everyday. We gave each other cool and warm feedback in order to improve our paper and edit it various times more than you can imagine. We started by doing 1 topic=18 topics, in other words talking about one topic in 18 different ways and perspectives. My one topic equals eighteen topics was about one of the most important things in my life which is running. The next step was starting your down draft which I initially did about running but I found this topic incredibly difficult to write about and thanks to my best-friend Verenice Patino I got and idea of writing about my grandfather and how drastically he changed my life.
1 Topic = 18 Topics worksheet
It was really difficult to fill this out because I had no Idea what I was going to write about so it was really frustrating, I chose to write about running and how I got injured in cross country and advice in what I could have done different, or stretching advice.
Five minute quick writes
The reason why we wrote these were to share with our class a little about our book and what we thought about it, then we would share any new words we had read, we didn't necessarily need to share new words, because sometimes books don't have so complicated words that we can't tell what it means by the context clues.
Down Draft
What I am most proud of, of my down draft is that it seems to really give people and idea of everything I went through in those really hard times for me and my family. Also that it didn't only give people a feeling of what I went through but also what my grandfather went through during all those years.
Graphic Organizers
We used four different types of graphic organizers
- Outline Tribute sheet
- Sensory Images graphic organizers
- Opening lines graphic organizers
- Proofreading checklist
Feedback and Critique
In my opinion all critique people give you is useful even though if it is something really obvious that you're aware of, people telling you about it, means that you should really change it since more people are noticing; personally the most helpful feedback I received was Dr. P's feedback, for example when he told me to fix my run on sentences and at the beginning of my piece he made some awesome changes, like telling me that the reader doesn't need to know all that and gave me an idea of what I could substitute that sentence with.
Reflection
At the beginning of the project I felt really strong about writing of my experience in track and cross country and writing about how I got injured before 10th grade started but since I found this topic surprisingly difficult to write about My ideas changed to writing about mt grandfather when I read my friend's piece and lastly the expanded to writing about my grandfather but how because of him my life change drastically. Something that I learned to appreciate during this project was the feedback people give you and really take the most of it, so that's something that im going to keep on doing through all my high school years in order to enhance my writing pieces. Something that I would change now is be more descriptive about my grandfathers health.