Blog Reflections

                 This trimester has been a little hectic with the snow days and many breaks, but one thing for sure, whether you’re snowed in or at school you can always read. This trimester I have read four excellent books. The books I read were The Host, Divergent, Insurgent, and Allegiant. My goal was to read three books by the end of the trimester so I have exceeded my goal. Goodreads helped me gain lots of suggestions for new reading material. I really enjoyed searching around the website and finding new books. It was also helpful to see what other people were reading. The last three books that I read were a series that I found on the Goodreads website. One thing that I have struggled with through this blogging experience was choosing a prompt that would really let me deeply explain what was happening in my book. As the trimester went on I feel like I improved in this area.

                Over the course of the trimester I have noticed that I have grown greatly in my ability to closely analyze my book in my blogs. I have found an example of a post at the beginning of the trimester and one from the end to prove how my ability to analyze a text has improved. They are linked below so you can read them:

Old Blog: http://juliawirthreadingblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/i-am-still-pretty-early-in-book-host-by.html

New Blog: http://juliawirthreadingblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/beatrice-to-tris-divergent.html

               At the beginning of the trimester all of my prompts were very basic and light and the ones towards the end are much more focused on analyzing the text. For an example, my prompt for the old blog was why I chose the book that I was reading and the prompt for the new blog was to write about a dynamic character and support how that character has changed throughout the text. An example from the old blog is “At first I chose the book because I had seen the trailer for the movie a little while ago and thought it looked interesting.” As you can see, there was no in-depth analyzing of the text I was reading and I wasn’t choosing prompts that allowed me to analyze the text. As the trimester progressed, I started switching up my prompts to ones that went deeper in hidden meanings and analyzing the text. An example from my newer blog is “This changed my opinion that she was a helpless little girl that needed to be protected to one of the strongest bravest people in the book protect the people that she loved even if it meant risking her own life.” This shows how I switched from describing the book to analyzing the book. I really worked hard on making these changes to my blog posts throughout the trimester. Changing prompts and analyzing the text gives the people reading my blogs a deeper understanding of the books I am reading.