Who am I? What are we doing? And how are we doing it? :)

Hello. I'm Alicia Kathryn Donoghue. I am a junior at Carbondale Community High School. English isn't my favorite subject for a couple of reasons. I don't like to read and many of the books that teachers have students read don't seem interesting to me. Also, my range of vocabulary isn't very wide so I dread writing essays. I understand that this blog isn't the same as an essay but I'm still a little nervous. Along with the nerves, it's also a exciting because it is one less major paper that won't be wrtitten. When I think of blogs, i usually thing of people expressing how they feel. I have never thought about using them to share my view of books. I'm hoping that this blog will help improve my vocabulary and help me learn that writing an essay isn't just sitting at a desk and that there is more than one way to recap or review what you have read or learned. I also hope that this will help me understand what I have in the book I chose.

I'm writing this blog as an alternative major essay assignment. For Track 1, English 3 at CCHS, we are required to do a program called Read for a Lifetime. Read for a Lifetime has 25 books that students can choose from. Students read the book and have to have a book talk with a teacher or libraian. The Illinois Library Association is the organization that sends the reading list out. It is state wide and it is just a program where students can read and get extra credit or prizes as a reward. The book I have chosen is The Boy Who Dared. It is about a young boy is part if Hitler's youth. His dream is to grow up and be a solider to protect is country. While a child, his father forces him to join Hitler's youth. He speaks out and is put into jail. Everyday he wakes up and wonders if he'll get to eat breakfast. In the end, he dies. I just think that everything about holacost is interesting. When we read books in history or english and they were about the holacost, I was in love. No, I would never want to be part of Hitler's team, I just am very interested in that kind of thing.

Some of the writing promts I can think of may not be good but they sound fun. What if we made on week into a list of things that could happen, or review over the main points that have happened in the book. I think that would be very interesting. I also like the idea of making a video and having us talk about the book on camera. Or one week, we could write about ourselves being in the characters shoes. What would we have done in this situation or what could I do differently that the main charater didn't think of. We could also find pictures to describe what has happened in the book then describe how we see the resemblences. I don't know how this one would work but one week we could write poems of what has happened? Just an idea. ANother one is we could write a short story and have characters identical to the ones in our books have what we think is going to happen next happen in our story. The last one I can think of is we could find someone who is reading the book, read their blog, then blog about if we have the same ideas or thoughts about the book.