Week 8 Reading Diary: Review

Wow, I can say that my first Reading Diary post was definitely the longest!  I remember reading the directions that week, prior to starting the assignment, but I was still unsure on how to construct the post.  I basically took the stories from my unit, and rewrote their plots.  This was very time consuming, and took a long time to complete the assignment.  During week three I tried to add my own input into the stories, but I still sort of wrote over the plots.  I found week three's unit difficult to write over, since all of the stories led into each other like a continuous plot. By week four, I began to get the hand of adding in my own input of the stories, but I found myself writing over almost all of them.  I began to see this as a problem when the unit would contain twenty plus stories, and I was trying to write over each one.  In the past three weeks I feel as if I am finally getting the hang of what the reading diary is really about.  I am trying to utilize it like a actual diary where I can mentally throw my true thoughts into text, which eventually becomes my blog post.  I prefer writing the diaries in this way because I can emphasize on the parts of the stories that I enjoy the most.  If I think of a way that I can change the story, that will help me later in re-tellings, I can put them down and come back to review them later.

The length of my reading diaries seem to vary with the length of the unit, or how many stories catch my eye.  I like to take my notes after I have finished the reading, and go back to review afterwards.  If I try to do it while reading I get easily flustered, and feel as if the process takes longer.  In general I remember a lot from the reading's I have done so far.  Many of the stories I have picked have been memorable, especially if they had a moral or theme to the tale.  I can say in my other classes I focus more of my reading around exam time.  This normally occurs when I have studied slides, or materials that have been provided for the class, and if I do not get the topic.  At this time I will resort to the textbook for further clarification.  I normally do not like to read on an electronic screen for too long, but in this class it doesn't seem to be a problem since I can pretty much start and stop when I please/need to.