Reflection from Unit 1: Non-Fiction

Reflection

Review some of the activities in unit 1 to see where you were engaged in Oral Communication, Reading, Writing, and Media Literacy.

1.  Fill in the following chart and post it to your blog.

	Strengths	Challenges	Preferences	Next Steps (areas to work on/improve)
Oral Communication (listening and speaking)	Listening to tonal changes in Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech	Oral communication not practiced a lot in this unit	Listening to speech with text in front of me	Practice rehearsing so that my presentation skills improve
Reading	Comprehension and connection questions	Complicated vocabulary in “Going for a Walk” story	Reading the questions first really help so I can determine the purpose of the reading	Read more traditional literature like Max Beerbohm or different poetry
Writing	Clearly communication on discussion posts	Persuasive speech	I really liked posting to the discussion page	Work on writing a good thesis so my ideas don’t get lost
Media Literacy	learning through different programs like grammarville or the interactive rhetorical devices program	researching many different websites sometimes makes things more confusing	Blog! I really like posting to the blog because it’s personal and less structured	Find credible websites and use them to my advantage now that I know the ins and out of MLA

2.  Write two paragraphs explaining how oral communication, reading, writing, and media literacy work together to enhance your learning.

The concepts learned this unit worked seamlessly together in order to enhance my overall skills. My reading was challenged in a good way from Max Beerbohm’s “Going out for a walk” story and the different poetry we had to analyze. The writing process I had to undergo for different assignments like the editing backward strategy, really improved my overall writing. Oral communication wasn’t practiced as much in this unit but it was interesting to do a voice-recorded speech and listen to myself afterward because it was easy to point out things that needed improvement. Finally, media literacy was a key skill for this unit and it was very useful with the discussion posting, blog and different programs I used.

I think that the skills I learned throughout this unit for reading, writing and media literacy help me to be a good oral communicator because my ideas and arguments are written clearly with evidence and links to the thesis. This makes for a better quality presentation. Oral communication, writing and media literacy help me in reading because with each assignment you learn new sentence structure, rhetorical devices, and styles of literature which helps me better understand diverse texts. Reading, media literacy and oral communication help in my writing because I read multiple examples of very good speeches and articles that I could compare to my own. Finally, my media literacy was improved by oral communication, reading and writing because each aspect helps me to be a more versatile learning and student.