Quarter 3

The activity that I will be doing this reflection about is the project called "The Colonial Newspaper". In this project, we were required to create a newspaper that might have been sold during the time of the colonies in America. We were given choices of some events that took place during the Revolutionary War and we created newspaper articles about them. These articles were in the standard format where we had to mention where, what, who, when, why, and how the event took place. I chose to make newspaper articles on the Battle of Saratoga, the Treaty of Paris, and a man named John Hancock who had the biggest, most flamboyant signature on the treaty that ended the war.

In my opinion, the purpose of this project was to shed much more light on some of the events that took place during the revolutionary war and on what exactly happened. The project enabled us to go on the internet and search for ourselves what happened during the events that transpired and this helps us much more than actually having someone teach it to us. Since we were the ones conducting the research, we had a different version of a "hands-on" experience that gave us more information and this information was applied by us into a project.

While doing this project, I had learned most everything about the Battle of Saratoga and the Treaty of Paris. I now know that the Battle of Saratoga was one of the most major wars that occured during the Revolutionary war and it was a huge turning point for the war in the favor of the Colonists. After the big victory at Saratoga, New York, the war for the colonial lands simply fell into the hands of the Americans and they started to win most every battle after that until they finally won the battle that ended the Revolutionary War; the Battle of Yorktown. Once the Americans won that war, with great help from the French, Great Britian surrendered and they gave the Americans their independance and freedom.

If there was one thing that I could have changed or done differently about the whole project was to remember one page from the newspaper. While I was printing the newspaper, I had forgotten to print the page about John Hancock and so I handed it in with one of the pages missing. This slightly lowered my grade and so I would have liked to have remembered printing it so that I could have gotten better marks on the project.

My goal this year in social studies is to better understand the world's history. This project has helped me greatly in achieving my goal since I did much research on the history of America and the Revolutionary War.

Quarter 4

I have grown very much over the course of the year that I have been here in eighth grasde. At the beginning of the year, I had not known too much about conventions and how to word specific types of sentences. After about three quarters, I have learned enough things about how to create sentences and how to perfect them. Now that I have learned all this, it has made a huge improvement in all the writing that I do now.

As a basis for this comparison of improvement, I will be using the values paper that I wrote close to the beginning of the year. I had very many spelling mistakes and other types of mistakes such as forgetting to capitalize, forgetting to put the comma and connecting two very short sentences. These such mistakes are very careless and are also mistakes that seventh or sixth graders wouldn't make. This is why I must improve and over the year, I am proud to say that I have improved dramatically and now it is very rare that I would make these kind of careless mistakes.

I have learned a great many things in grammar that I actually never knew before. These things include how to use semicolons, whether to capitilaze "the summer" or not and other things like that.

Quarter 2

The activity that I will be doing this quarter 2 reflection on is the Colonization Simulation Game. This game had us go into of four to five and together, each group would create a colony. During the game we could trade with the other groups in the class, we could trade with the Native Americans, we could engage in battle with the other groups and many more exciting things could happen.

The purpose of the Colonization Simulation Game was to create an atmosphere of the time during the colonies and it also allowed for it to be as accurate as possible by adding weather, general welfare among other things to the equation. This taught us about what life was like in the colonies and how the colonists would get by. It also taught us how rough the life of the colonists could be. For example: One group in our class had lost two out of the three ships that they brought with them when they were sailing over the Atlantic Ocean. These two ships were not lost by Native American attacks or Spanish attacks, but by the raging ocean. This in itself showed us how important nature was in the survival of the colonists. When that same group landed on the shore of America, they were met with even more unhappiness like the weather which made them produce little food when farming, fishing and hunting. Sometimes the weather would make them unable to produce anything and sometimes the weather would kill some of the people or a percentage of the people that they brought would be lost. This would provide us with a "hands on" experience to what was really going on in the colonies.

I learned many things during this game because it allowed us to experience exactly what was happening. Some of the colonists had left there homes in England and Europe to come and settle in these strange new lands. Also, some colonists decided against staying with their families and they moved to America to start new lives where they could have religious freedom. This applied greatly on the Pilgrims and the Puritans who came because they wanted to flee the Anglican Church which was persecuting them because of their religious views. The Pilgrims wanted to seperate from the Anglican Church completely and the Puritans only wanted to purify it because of the corruption and the amount of power in the church members' hands. I also learned that I was very hard for the colonists because the weather worked against them most of the time and it stopped them from fishing, hunting and even farming. It also simulated the Native American views on the colonies's advance because the game had them attack us every now and then. This also taught us how hard it was for some colonies because some of the Native Americans were never open to the idea of the English colonies simply coming in onto their land and taking it from the Native Americans.

Our group could have done many things differently by changing what we would trade for with the Native Americans and also with the other colonies. We could have also changed the amount of each thing that we could have brought because each item brought as a wealth value. This wealth value contributes to the success of each group in the form of points in a game.

My goal in Social Studies is to enhance my learning of history and this game is a very big role. This game has provided me with a "hands on" experience as I have mentioned before and this really helped me to understand what it was like back in the colonies' time. This let me understand better how politics worked back then in the form of trade with all the other colonies and the other Native American tribes that were either hostile or friendly

Quarter 1

The activity that I will be doing this reflection on is my Renaissance Passport. In the Renaissance Passport, we had to take the role of a man or a woman during the Renaissance Era and we were required to research our person's occupation, what his/her personality would be like, their nationality and other things along with it. I took the role of an astronomer from Italy who believed that the planets and Earth revolve around the Sun and not the Sun and the planets revolving around the Earth.

The purpose of this project or activity was to enhance our knowledge of the Renaissance age or era and what the personality of the people that lived during that era were. We also researched on what many people during the Renaissance Era did and how they did it. This would improve our understanding of what life was like back then and which nations were mostly impacted during that age. Also, since the role that I took was that of an astronomer, I learned about many different astronomers like Galileo and such, this would also apply to people who took the roles of different people like inventing, cooking etc.

I learned a great deal more about what life was like back during the Renaissance and what the people did and also which nations were affected by this huge advancing age in science. The nations that were mostly involved in it were Italy, England and many others too. I have also learned that life was tough for some astronomers like Galileo because they had believed that the Earth and all the other planets revolved around the Sun and not the other way round. This resulted in the Church's anger and they were inprisoned like Galileo. I learned that the term "Renaissance Man" came from the fact that during the Renaissance, many had a lot of occupations like how Leonardo Da Vinci was an inventor, painter, sculpture, thinker and many other things along with it.

If I could have done anything differently, I would have changed the whole layout and the whole template of the passport. I would have tried to make it look a little more authentic like a real Italian passport with a logo and the same color. I also could have used a different type of paper to make it more colorful.

My goal this year in Social Studies is to enhance my understanding about history and other things of the sort. This project or activity has had a definite impact on this goal and it certainly has made me develop a better understanding of what has happened during the Renaissance Era and what inventions and ideas were created that we use even now, in the 21st century.