Project Description:In this project we learned about different places in Africa and the history of it. Mainly we focused on the place we chose to learn about. I chose Zimbabwe, Africa. I thought it was really interesting and cool that we got to write a fictional stories. I enjoy writing and creating a book cover, it was tons of fun!! My story is called, “Growing Up...or not” it’s about a boy named Unonzwa he’s from Kwekwe, Zimbabwe. He is 13 years old and has a very wealthy family. At his age, Unonzwa should already have a family and a successful farm. This is all during the 1800’s, during this time a group of people are suppose to be taking over their villages.
Reflection: This project is about learning how to write a fictional story, but before that the assignments that lead to that was reading the Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. After reading the book, I didn’t realize that we were going to be writing our own stories after that. I love writing but there was always a challenge to it. Like describing how the fictional character looked facial features and I always had a hard time with that.
One take away I had during this project was when we actually learned about Africa. During the past school years we never really talked about Africa unless it was about something that was on the news. We learned about imperialism and about Africa from the books we read, articles and interviews. They are all very interesting I really enjoyed this project because not only we talked about Africa but we also talked about how we all give each other stereotypes so easily just from what we hear or see. For an example, Africa is known mostly for being poor and not having clean water, right? That’s what I mean, we were only taught that Africa is poor and I learned that we judge each other first, not knowing anything else about the actual person or place.
For the cover I created I didn't know what to use for it, but I did have some ideas I wanted to create for my cover. That didn't happen because when I started to make my cover it was actually difficult than I thought it was going to be, so I went with my second choice. Since Unonzwa is growing up, I chose to use a sprout that was in the growing process and as it grew so did Unonzwa. The sprout is Unonzwa, in the beginning of the story he knew sooner or later he had to start his own family and in the village he lived in most kids his age or a little bit younger already had their own families. As he grows like the sprout Unonzwa becomes stronger and independent.
I'm really proud of how far my story came because I didn't think it would get to eight pages!! I never thought I would write that much and I'm really proud of that but not only that though I'm also proud of how much detail I put into it. Even though it looks like I didn't really put any in my story, I felt like I did pretty good with that because I have a hard time with adding in details. But if I were to change one thing in my story it would be the exposition because I felt like I spent more time on that than I did with the rest of my story. I could've made it a little shorter because the rest of my story feels like it doesn't have as much effort in it. If that makes sense. The most challenging thing in this project was creating the character and the whole outline. I'm the type of person who wants everything to be good and perfect, so that was really challenging because I had a picture of what I wanted my character to look like but I didn't know how to describe them. I'm not good at describing people like their facial features. "Unonzwa felt as if he was about to faint, he couldn’t believe this was happening." This is one of the lines I felt like I grew in because it's describing his emotion and to me this is what I feel like I grew in.
In this project I've felt confident and creative while writing my historical fiction writing but I was also very shy to show my teacher and peers what I was writing about. Every time we did peer critique I felt sick and happy, sick because I didn't know if my story made sense. I just put all my ideas down and then added more to it soon enough it became paragraphs. But I'm really glad we had those peer critiques because they really did help me with improving my story not only that it helped with my writing skills as well. I enjoyed this project because I got to experience writing a historical fiction story and I also actually learned about Africa. I feel like I've grown a lot more with my writing and with my confidence.