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Connor Johanning English Summer Project A-2 Mrs. Razor The theme for my literacy is that everything has a connection. Such as during the summer, when I was on twitter I saw things regarding the shooting in the movie theater. I also saw news headlines on the subject along with facebook posts. At the time I was reading The City of Bones which is a book about violence and action and heroes. The connection between the book and the news was violence, violence is everywhere today, it has become ingrained in our civilization and is becoming a more regular thing.
Back in the 1800’s news of shootings outside of war was a very big deal. Nowadays, school shootings go nearly unnoticed after a couple of days, and no one seems to notice that in 24 hours 24 people were killed in shootings in the city of Chicago alone. Violence is a connection that can be seen in nearly everything today. During the school year while I was reading my assignments I noticed it said that hard work pays off in the long run, and that we should work hard once we are assigned a project instead of waiting until the last minute to do the project.
I also saw that in the news there was an article on how hard work in school can help you improve your future life both financially and mentally. Hard work can prepare you for any task that would be hard to do. Hard work is connecting the assignment with the news. There is always a connection between two articles of writing, all literature is intertwined somewhere somehow in our minds. Something I noticed throughout this project is that I tend to read less formally in the summer, because there are less guidelines as far as reading.
I can connect this to a web article that claimed that in the summer kids lose about 65-75% of all knowledge they gained over the school year. I found this claim very surprising yet I also find it understandable. Most children are not going to review notes during the summer to review for next years french courses or go over grammatical rules for fun. This is why summer projects are important to the curriculum. They give kids constructive work to do over the summer break that helps them retain some nowledge and habits they gained from last years classes.
The last connection that I saw in everything I read was knowledge. In nearly everything people are trying to gain more knowledge. Whether it be the cure for a disease such as cancer or where the closest gas station is, people, whether they know it or not, are constantly consuming information in all ways. People learn from the news where the traffic Jams and road construction zones are. On twitter kids are finding out what everyone is doing and where people are going to hang out.
On the web people are being fed information about anything they choose to look up, such as research on muscular dystrophy, or how old Micheal Jackson was when he started problem is people are less worried about retaining knowledge now that you can google anything you want. Connecting is a large part of literature as this project has shown me, I never thought that twitter could be connected to a book written 5 years ago, but never the less it can.
Connections help us piece together everything we know, if we only have ne source of knowledge we cant expand that knowledge until further knowledge is gathered. If we have one book on a subject, we can read web articles that may or may not go into further detail, but may also point out other common facts not stated previously. Anything we see somewhere can be found elsewhere. The main connecting piece is our mind, which stores the information that we find and tells us how it shows up in other pieces of literature. Connections are made in everything and are what we use to gain and retain information.