Blogger #5, Julianna Guidetti, Period 1, 2/23/21, Day A

 RL: “Speak” & Narrative Voices 

Aim: How can active reading be applied to interpret writers’ choices that create a narrative voice?

Do Now: What does it mean to you when you hear the phrase: “to come of age”? 

Our do now was a class discussion. Some answers include:

Names	Responses
Samiha Anjum	When someone grows up and goes through changes, as well as personal development.
Andrew Neria	It is development, maturity, understanding yourself and becoming aware of yourself. It’s a big turning point of a realization or a hardship you endured where in the end you become a different person.
Emily Liu	It is mentally changing where you are learning who you are and how to express yourself. You become your own person and ignore the comments of others. It’s a self realization.

Next, we did a review of what double-entry journals are. Double-entry journals are a note taking strategy. It allows you to connect your own experience to those of the characters, share your opinions about what is happening, trace the development of the characters, and comment on the writers choices that create the voice of the character.

In order to create a double-entry journal, you would make a simple T-chart. On the left side, put the selected quote you want to react to there. On the right is where you include your comment on the statement. 

These are some helpful sentence starters for your comments provided by Mrs. Peterson. 

After this, we watched an informative video about narrative voice. It talks about the different points of view and which pronouns to use. For instance, third person would use pronouns like he, she, and they. 

For reference, this is the video: https://youtu.be/CHl7mDZzfDw

Next, we did some spirit reading for a scene from Speak. It was about the narrator named Melinda who was at her first day of high school. Spirit reading in our class is when anyone can volunteer to read and stop at any part to allow others to have a turn. While students were reading, we had to annotate and pay particular attention to diction, imagery, and syntax. 

Our collaborative activity was to go into breakout rooms for a think, pair, share. First, we chose four of our quotes we highlighted and reacted to them in a chart. We shared our Google Document with someone from our group to allow them to comment on our reactions.

This activity was really successful because I got to see what other people thought about the excerpt and thought of things that I didn't think of. I also enjoyed the piece chosen, it was very intriguing and captivating. 

To conclude, we had an individual activity in which we discussed the accuracy a teen girl is portrayed despite the writer being 38 years old. We chose three quotes that we felt sounded authentic to a teen voice and responded to the following questions: “Does Melina’s sarcastic interior monologue seem authentic? Why or why not?” and, “What inferences can students draw based on her voice? From her voicelessness?” This concluding activity was very interesting to me because of how spot on a teen girl is written. It was a relatable story. 

In summation, I learned a lot from today’s class which was how to create a double-entry journal and the importance of it. I also did some highlighting of the text, which was a good way to stay on top of my annotation skills and really analyze the authors’ style. This type of annotation and writing was taught to help students connect to the characters and gain a deeper understanding of the writing. It can be used for a multitude of reasons, such as studying character development, tracking events in writing, mapping out evidence when writing essays, or to just track your mood while reading. It is very versatile and will help students and their ability to dig deep into the text and “read between the lines”. Marking up the text for diction, imagery, and syntax adds on to the understanding of the author, their purpose, and how they want the reader to feel while reading. I will use what I learned to thoroughly analyze a text for both understanding the targeted mood, author's purpose, and narrative voice. This lesson did an amazing job of ensuring I understood the aim and I will use this method of understanding what I read better.