These were my goals in the beginning of the year:
Writing: My goal for writing is to write stories with a problem and a solution because I can think of a problem but often I can't think of a solution. I'm trying to do this for almost every writing piece I can and by the end of the year I want to do this for every single story I write.
Reading: I want to read more genres in reading because mostly I read either fantasy or general fiction. I want to go into historical fiction, science fiction, animal, biography, autobiography etc.
Math: I want to use the right strategy for any math problem I do. Usually, I don't know what strategy to use in problem solving therefore I often have a hard time solving problems. By the middle or end of the year I want to exceed this goal.I've improved a lot in writing by writing a topic sentence that grabs the readers attention. I also try to stay on topic and try to make my writing interesting so the reader doesn't get bored. I realized this year that I'm better off writing about my own personal experiences than trying to make up a realistic fiction story- I'm not that great at making up stories but I'm still improving! I am also using new words that I find when I read and when I do vocabulary homework. Now that I know my weakness is in creating fictional stories, I'm going to try and make up more stories daily for 10-15 minutes using new words I have read. But I think I'll still stick to writing personal experiences at school rather than writing fictional stories
at school.I have achieved my goals for reading. Now I'm reading autobiographies/biography, Mystery, Historical-fiction, Science-fiction (Non-fiction project). Now, instead of reading only famous authors books, I'm also reading random books that seem good by the blurbs whether the cover looks good or not. I remember the saying "Don't judge a book by it's cover". I also think that in my literature circle group, we are reading a really easy book and my group agrees with me. Last year in 4th grade, we read a book that was much more harder- well in the case that, that book was a "Just Right" book for me. It's not that I didn't like the book, it was just that there were not any new words that I had learned. This was a book too easy for me. I don't want to challenge myself too much but I don't want to read such easy books either.
I still am really weak at problem solving even though I do so much- at school, homework, workbooks and the math puzzler. I guess I've improved on what strategy to use when I'm problem solving but overall I still think I REALLY need to work on that.
My Extra Goal for 6th Grade:
~To become better at problem solving and to collaborate with people even more. As I've said earlier, some of my real successes are writing personal experiences and reading different books and genres. Some challenges this year were showing my work for some of the problem solving questions because I didn't really know how to work them out. I am really hoping I will overcome this challenge because I want to become better at problem solving- not only the math type of problem solving but just general problem solving. Last year, when I was in the "Math Olympiad" team we use to have practice tests and real tests for just getting the answer to these problems without any explanation. Even though I practiced a lot at home, I never seemed to get any of the questions right except maybe 1 or 2. There was only one time that I got 4 out of 5 but that was just once! I don't think Math Olympiad helped me at all- It was all about getting the answer. No explanation, nothing. Not that I got it or anything. I'm a little glad that I'm not in Math Olympiad this year even though my Mom wanted me to be in it again.