Name: Hawaiian Hero Argumentative Essay Date: 3/29/2019 Subject: English Language Arts Facilitator: Mrs. Terry
Description of Work: In English language arts we have been working on a Hawaiian Hero's tournament. This is a competition on who's Hawaiian Hero is the best. Each student has chosen, from a list, a hero from Hawaii. There are multiple rounds in which we compete against another student and their hero. For each round we have an assignment. For example, the rounds can be a debate, an essay, a drawing, etc. Then at the end of each round, the entire class anonymously votes on who they liked best. One round was that we had to make an argumentative essay about our hero. My hero is Queen Keopuolani. We are basically trying to prove that our hero is better than the others. My claim was that Queen Keopuolani was one of the most sacred people to lay foot in Hawaii. We had to make strong claims with evidence. I included facts about her life and how those pieces of her life made her the best. I wanted it to be captivating to the reader. Once the essay was due we all came to class with a hard copy of it. The essays were set on the table side to side with your competitors essay. Then in small groups our classmates were to read our essays and vote for who they thought was better. No one knew which essay belonged to who since there were no names. On a little post it note were the votes and then at the end, when we have read every ones essays, we counted the votes.
Which 21st Century Skills do you feel this assignment addresses, and why? Information Skills- I applied relevant computer and technology. I had to research a lot on my computer to find relevant and trustworthy sources. I had to depend on what I could find on the internet since there weren't many informational sources on my hero. By using technology I was able to find as many facts I could get about a monarch of Hawaii.
Self-Directional Skills- I was able to understand and monitor my own learning and goal set. I had to prepare and reach my final goal for how I wanted my final essay outcome to be. I knew I wanted it to be very captivating to the reader and reach their attention as they're reading it. That depended on me and only me to be able to achieve what I wanted.
What are you most proud of from this assignment, and why? What I'm most proud of is how my essay ended up. I feel like I really reached my goal of making it very captivating and wanting the reader to keep reading. I also ended up winning this round which I wasn't sure about because I had a very good opponent.
How did you develop and/or improve upon your 21st Century Skills with this assignment? I improved on my information skills because I had to do a lot of research to find good interesting facts about Keopuolani. This helped my informational skills and self-directional skills.
What was most difficult about completing this task? What was most difficult about completing this task is that I had to make sure I wasn't writing an essay about her life. I started writing a lot about things about her life but that wasn't going to captivate the reader or argue anything. I had to delete a paragraph writing about something that happened in her life when I realized it was pretty irrelevant for trying to show how she was superior to the rest. I had to keep reminding myself that I am trying to prove that she's better than who I'm going against.
How could you improve this work? If you could start over, what would you do different? One thing Icould improve would be the format of my essay. I forgot to put it in MLA format which could have made my essay look nicer and more professional. Also I feel like when we first started working on the essay it was more complicated to think of ideas but if I could have put myself in the mindset of coming up with good arguments I could have gotten a better start and possibly had a better finished writing.
How does this relate to what you have learned in the past? This relates to what I have learned in the past by my skills on being able to research and use as much information I can find when I have low resources. Also being able to write argumentative essays which we worked on last year so I used my background knowledge from that for this essay. I knew how to build strong cases and arguments for this essay.
How can you apply this to future learning? How I can apply this to future learning is by knowing how to build strong arguments which will help me in future essays. Knowing how to build a strong case of arguments and strong evidence.