Week 9 - Journal 4

“What a nice independent learning week! “ Even there were a lot of assignments and projects; I did some practice for my English skills. This time I changed the routine by starting with reading skill. I borrowed new stories which are Emma and The Machine of the Time. I’ve chosen “Emma” story because I read before a story which was written by June Austen. It was a really nice and understandable story. I wrote a summary as usual but I made a few things too beside the summary. Firstly, I wrote the main ideas for the first chapter only because I didn’t want to spend much time in reading only. Especially, I almost focused in my plans in the weekend. In addition, I used this website http://www.magportal.com/c/edu/coll/ instead of www.plos.org because it was too complex to me and I felt bored because of the science topics. I’ve read in this website an article about education and college. It was really nice. However, I decided to paraphrase the article and I wrote it by my own words. It’s not written in my plans but I added it because I felt that my strategies are not enough. I felt satisfied about reading skill for this week because I added a new strategy which is paraphrasing the articles.

Furthermore, I stayed in touch with vocabularies as much as I can, even though I practiced what I have in my planner. When I see any words during my shopping or when I heard anyone speaks in English, I try to understand each word. For example, yesterday we went to Early Learning Center to observe thy toys and we had a short lecture about how the toy is important and what is the educational value of toys. I learned the word “durable” which means how solid this toy is and it cannot break off quickly. Then, I returned back to my home and I reviewed some words which related to explanation of toys, such as discover, develop and figure. Moreover, I noticed that I can participate with any discussion that related to human development and toys because of the amount of words that I have. Next time, I will start to memorize new vocabularies about specific topics because I noticed that I’m able to learn more and have more words when I focus in specific topic as what was happening with the topic that related to human development.

My third skill which becomes my favor one is speaking and pronunciation. As I decided last week, I sat with my family on Friday and we had a new topic for discussion which was about being late in our works and home. This topic made all of us enthusiastic to talk. I felt that this time I improved logically too because we’ve used many evidences to say that being late is not appropriate thing to do even in jobs or homes because we have to follow the rules as people who are parts of family or jobs. However, we made some mistakes but we corrected each other. Especially, the verb tenses and how to use the suitable vocabulary for the sentences. For example, I said that “late from the class is a really bad thing”. Then, my father corrected me and he said I should use the word lateness instead of late. In addition, I recorded my voice for 15 minutes when I speak about volunteering. I felt that I can speak a lot because I worked as a volunteer in students union which means that I have the experience. I noticed that I didn’t have the same pauses as before. But still little mistakes have been made. I will try to avoid them as much as I can during my practices. I felt that I did well this week which made me proud on myself.

Ayesha,