SIERRA BONEY
PORTFOLIO
Language Arts
At STEM we learn a lot of things. Something we emphasize here is creativity. It is one of the 5 qualities which you can learn more about by going to the main projects page. I have become better at creativity through my language arts class.
Something I worked on this year in language arts that really expressed creativity was writing poems. The first poem we wrote was the I Am From poem. The purpose was to learn and get comfortable with a new writing format that we had never tried before. The first thing we did was read some other I am from poems that Ms. Miller showed us in class. This was to kind of get our creative flow going. And most of us had never seen or heard of an I am from poem so we couldn’t just write a poem with a format that we had never heard of. The next thing we did was brainstorm some topics we could write about so that we knew where to start. After that Ms. Miller gave us a sheet to organize our thoughts so that it was really easy for us to just finish the sentences and write it down on a separate piece of paper for the final. Then we wrote out the final product in a blue or black pen and then we turned it in for a grade. An I am from poem is when you write a poem about yourself and everything that you mean to the world. Basically how you are and where you are, like a metaphor. You start the first line of every stanza with the words “I am from”, then whatever you write after that, you take the rest of the stanza to elaborate. A stanza is a part of every poem. It is like a paragraph but it is called a stanza in poetry and it is composed of lines. Lines are literally lines of text that make up a stanza, which makes up a poem. My poem explained my love for books, my family, and my isolation from the rest of the world and things like that. I had to use a lot of creativity and learn about myself to write this because I don’t usually write things like that so it really added to my creativity.
Something else that demonstrated my growth of creativity through language arts class are my free-writes in our writer’s notebooks. A writer’s notebook is a composition notebook that each person in the class has, we use at the beginning of each class on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Ms. Miller usually writes a prompt for us to write about. Sometimes it’s a series of questions, sometimes it’s our opinion, and sometimes it’s a picture that we have to write our thoughts about or maybe write a story that relates to the picture. We get ten minutes to fill the whole page and we have to write the whole time and the purpose it to get our brains going and our creativity flowing. A free-write is when we have no prompt, we can just write about whatever we want. You could write things like what you ate for lunch to a full blown story with plots, characters, conflicts, themes and settings. A plot is the main idea of a story, the thing the characters are trying to accomplish. The characters are the people in the story that you’re writing or reading. The plot is sort of like the theme, but a theme is more like the mood of the story, is it dark and scary? Is it light and fluffy? The conflict of a story is just that, a conflict. It is what is holding the characters back from getting what they want or are trying to accomplish, like the plot. And the setting is where and when all of this is taking place. What day, what time, how old are the characters, what year, where are they? Those are all questions that determine the setting. When looking at one of my free-writes from the beginning of the year, like number 6, about a girl that wanted pizza you see that I just way over thought about them. I wanted to write a complete short story with character arches and things like that. But I couldn’t do that and I thought I wasn’t good at writing. But now, my free-writes are interesting and not overdoing it. When looking at the most recent one that I made, number 25, you can see that I just wrote about things I did that day. It wasn’t too much and it wasn’t too little. I think it really showed my creativity compared to the others because I didn’t need to think about it for it still to be good. When you look at it you can even see I add arrows with thoughts about what I was saying. Sometimes I didn’t even know why I wrote something. When you look at this you see mindless thoughts flowing out of me. That is what creativity is.
Creativity is a never ending process. You can always be more creative. I think I still need to work on being more original with my work and having ideas just constantly pop into my head. It’s not something you can just achieve over night, but with work and patience it just might be possible. I really do hope I can continue to better my skills and I think I will be able to because STEM values it and STEM has a wonderful learning environment and I believe I can accomplish anything here.
