Sebbi Neises' Digital  Portfolio

I have a hard time studying. I always have to be in a quiet space, with little to no distractions. This is hard to achieve, considering that I have two younger siblings. They make everything way more difficult. So I either have to study in my basement, which is ok. I can listen to music, and that blocks out the sound of my siblings. What I usually study, is the readings that we are assigned in class as homework. And I will look over those a few times until I feel that I have enough of the information. I will also study the map of the states. This is for the occasional map quizzes that we have in class. I don’t have to study for these as often, because I seem to remember a lot of it. But I will study it anyway, because it is always good to be prepared. My growth claim is that I have grown in studying, even when the location isn’t as promising. 

Something that will help explain my claim is the map quizzes. These are quizzes that have 50 boxes on them. When we get the paper, we also get a numbered map. We have to put the states names in the boxes based on what the map looks like. At first, we just had to put the names in the right place. I thought I had this down, but I received some low scores on the quizzes. So I started to study a little bit. This got the job done, but I wasn’t getting perfect scores. But later into the year we also had to spell them right. This is when my scores started to decrease. So I had to study more intensely. But this meant that I had to sit at the table for longer. And with little siblings, things don’t always go as planned. After I got over that, I started to receive some better grades on them. They were not perfect, but they were better than the ones that I was getting.

To study, I will sometimes listen to music. This blocks out distractions, such as the television, or my siblings, or my greatest weakness, food. The bad part about listening to music is that I start to dance without really knowing it. Then I become the distraction. That’s where my other solution comes in.

Sometimes I will just go to my basement to study, it is pretty quite down there. And there aren’t a lot of distractions down there. The bad part about this one is that I can hear my siblings chasing each other upstairs. So that gets really annoying.

My most perfect solution is to go to my room and close the door. There isn’t a lot of running room upstairs in my house, so I rarely hear my siblings running up there. Also because none of them are allowed in my room, they can’t come in and ask me really dumb questions. This is probably my most perfect solution, and this is the one I usually go with.

The other 2 solutions are good, if my siblings are still at school, such as on e-days, because most of the time, whenever we have an e-day, they will have school still.

My other artifact is my active reading strategy. I used to just sit there and read it. I didn’t actually do anything, which effected my because I wouldn’t remember anything from the reading. And whenever we had a quiz, I would usually fail it. But then I realized that my grade was going way down. So I decided to study harder. I would highlight the important parts of the reading, such as the dates or the changing points. Then I would write it down on a piece of paper. I would then intensely study that piece of paper at school until I could answer the questions without thinking about it. I used to use note cards, but that got confusing because there was a ton of the cards, and I didn’t know what order to put them in.

Not only has this affected my studying efforts in history, but also I have been studying harder for all of my classes. For instance, everyday when I get home, I take out all of my work for the day, and spend an hour on it. I also have my parents check the work for mistakes, or if I didn’t put enough effort into something. In math I have been struggling, but my dad is really good at math, so ill have him help me.