The Life of Diana

Service learning is an important experience that gives me the opportunity to learn more about the community while allowing me to teach my buddies new things. It provides me the chance to act as a leader and to collaborate with others. I hope that through this experience I can improve my leadership and social skills throughout my years in high school. This year I have been assigned a partner from my English class to work with a small group of four fourth graders. We will teach them how to write paragraphs, plan group activities, and form friendships with them. A couple of my goals for this year's service learning are to help my buddies improve their writing skills and encourage them to become friends with each other if they aren't already. In addition, my experience from last year will help me to better socialize with my buddies.

Two weeks ago my whole English class and I had to write an in-class essay based on the book we read over summer called  The Thing Around Your Neck . I had revised my thesis statements only once coming into the in-class essay. I was not very confident because I was not sure if I would be able to pick quotes and write my whole essay in the amount of time we were given. At the end of the essay, I felt like I had tried my best. Next class we had a thesis statement workshop where we learned more about how to write the perfect thesis statement. It included how a thesis statement must have an arguable point and it is supposed to inform the reader what you're argument is going to prove. Although I knew much of this already, I was motivated to revise my thesis statements and make them better so that anyone who was reading my essay would be able to understand what the story is about without having to read it. A few days ago we were given the opportunity to revise our essays. This gave me...