Have you ever wondered about how you can improve your reading skills? You have come to the right place. For 1st, 2nd and 3rd quarter we had to do a thing called Independent Reading Project. In this project, we used a little bit of PBL. We had to read a book and learn about to have to incorporate it to the Project that we had to do. The two artifacts that I will show is my 1st Independent reading Project Rubric and my second quarter novel summary sheet. I will show that I grew in reading skills in these because it shows cognitive thinking and authors craft, especially in the novel summary sheet.

 

My first artifact is the Novel Summary Sheet. In his we had to answer some basic questions about the book that we read like exposition (what happened in the beginning of the book), setting (where the book takes place), description of main characters and conflict (What happens in the middle of the book or what is the problem). In this part of the project you use a lot of reading skills because reading skills literally mean cognitive thinking and finding the answers to the questions using your knowledge of reading skills. The steps that I took were, first I tried to read the book repeatedly so I can get a better understand the concept. Next, I had to find parts of the book that might help me with some of the questions that are in the Novel Summary Sheet. Lastly, I had to incorporate my ideas of the book to the piece of paper. I grew in reading skills by doing the novel summary sheet. When I was in seventh grade I didn’t know how to find answers from the book so whenever we had lit. circles I had a tough time filling out the questions. When I went to do the novel summary sheet I had a little trouble but we did it repeatedly and I also inquired myself to ask my teacher. Then I got the hang of it so the next time I did it I had no trouble and I got a very good grade on that part.

 

My second artifact is the Independent Reading Project Rubric. In this we had to do different pieces to show that you understood what you read. The whole project consists of you reading a book, finding 10 sentences from the book, novel summary sheet and book review. All of this involves reading skills because you must find the theme and resolution of the book. Theme is the morale of the story and what major thing did you learn from the book. Resolution is the end of the book and if they solved the problem or not. These things use reading skills because you use your thinking to find the answers to the questions that you have in your book. I grew in reading skills with this project because the first Independent Reading Project I got a 90/100 as you can see in the picture and the second I got a 93/100 so you can see I got three points more because I used reading skills and read the book carefully to answer the questions with detail and to get a good grade.

 

After reading this you might think that if you practice you can be good at reading skills and catch on the reading very quickly. DRSS has made me a better person because of the five qualities and the subjects that we learn about. I used to be very bad at language arts and get B’s every time in my elementary school, but when I came to STEM I never got a B except once in the whole middle school year. I have truly grown in reading skills because from year to year I can see that I am getting better grades on lit. circles and essay’s. In the future, I want to be a computer engineer and whenever you are a computer engineer you will read books about programming and you might have to incorporate that on your program so that uses reading skills. STEM has helped me grow in Language Arts and reading skills to make me a better person in school and outside of school.