Part 1: This quarter, we wrote college essays, read poetry and novels, recited memorized poems. Each lesson was intended to teach lessons that extend beyond the classroom. For each activity listed below, explain (a) what you did, (b) the skills you learned, (c) the lessons you learned that are relevant to life after high school.

1. college essay
2. sonnet
3. novel
4. poem recitation
5. webfolio

Part 2: For the third quarter, we will be writing a research paper. All year, we have been preparing for this assignment by learning how to properly format a Word document in MLA style, cite sources, and create a works cited page. Upload a properly formatted Word document to the Midterm Blog subpage that has the following:

1. proper font and size
2. page numbering
3. heading
4. title
5. a paragraph describing your favorite line from the novel you read with parenthetical citation
6. page break
7. works cited page with your novel cited

        Throughout the second quarter, many lessons were learned that would be relevant to my life after high school. We started off with the college essay and our instructions were to create the essay about ourselves. We had to ask our self what are our post High School aspirations and how do we want to be recognized? Then we had to develop the essay so it gave the reader a sense of the kind of person we are. I improved on my writing skills with this assignment because I wasn’t used to writing an essay for this particular purpose. The lesson I learned from this project was to never hold back who you truly are. Show what kind of person you are because you will never know who will recognize you.  
        Our next assignment was the Sonnet, which was where we had to write a poem using the attached Word template to demonstrate mastery of the rhythm and rhyme scheme for a Shakespearean sonnet. Then, we had to decorate our sonnets to make it stand out. This assignment helped me improve on my writing and rhyming skills. I don’t write poetry too often so when I was given this assignment I wasn’t sure how good I was going to be at it. Luckily, I didn’t have too much trouble coming up with lines that rhymed and had 10 syllables. The lessons I learned were that poetry isn’t just lines. Its words that have a greater meaning and could develop a personal connection for you. Poetry can help open a person up. 
        For the novel, we had to choose between five novels to read on your own. I chose to read A Prayer for Owen Meany. I improved on my reading skills with this assignment because I hardly ever read especially novels with that many pages. This assignment probably would have been better if we did it as a class because then everything would have been taken care of at a steady pace without having to stress that you didn’t read the right amount of pages. The lesson I learned with this assignment is that I’m not good at these kinds of assignments because I tend to not make it a priority and put it off till later. I’m way better at doing assignments like these as a group.
        With the poem recitation, we had to choose, memorize, and recite a poem in front of our class. When given this assignment I was very hesitant at first to do it because I hate presenting in front of a class but I did learn some skills from this assignment. I improved on my memorization skills a lot. I’m not used to memorizing poetry, but surprisingly it didn’t take me too long to memorize the whole thing. A lesson that I’ve learned was too not be afraid or care what other people think when doing presentations or anything for that matter. When it was my turn, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. I learned that as soon you overcome your fear, it gets way easier from then on. 
        Another assignment we did was our webfolio. This is a professional/academic website used to display all our assignments that we did throughout the year including our blogs. With this website, you’re allowed to be as creative as you want. Each page should have a visible picture of the document with a description and three different downloadable versions of the document.  I improved and learned a lot of skills while doing this assignment such as my organization and web-editing skills.  The lesson I’ve learned from this assignment is too always stay organized or else you will end up with unwanted stress. This website has helped keep all my work in order from the beginning of the year. All my work would have been scrambled or lost if it wasn’t for this website. It also has helped push me to give in my work because regardless I would have to do it or else I would end up with two bad grades.