Hello blog! Last month we started the classic high school assignment, reading Lord of the Flies. I’ve always wondered what grade I’d read this book in, and the time finally came! I’m a total nerd when it comes to survival stories, I love them, always have.

So, I was excited when this project came around. I was a little nervous though as this project was fully English based, and I don’t have the easier time with writing, but I was excited to improve my writing skills. Our last project was very history based, so it’s always nice to switch it up! Anyways, the driving question of this project is…

“WHAT IS THE ROLE OF TRIBALISM IN SOCIETY”

The outline for this project was reading the book, doing writing prompts/journal entries, choosing a tribe to do a project on, relating the tribe to the book, taking a book analysis test, and then presenting a keynote. To switch it up, I’m going to show you the final product of this project first, then explain all the work I and my classmates did to get there.

You have no idea what this means, let me explain from the start.

READING AND WRITING 

Once we began reading the book, deadlines were set and assignments were assigned. Every week we had a certain to chapter to read to, and a journal entry with a given prompt to write about. While reading I took notes, which was helpful while writing because I had exact events and quotes written down. Here are some of my journal entries. 

In this category of the project we worked with the curricular competency READING AND PERSONAL TEXT RESPONSE. The whole goal of reading this book was to understand the concepts and themes behind it, and we did that through group discussions and writing. Writing helped me further developed the ideas in my head which made the outcome better. Something I realized while reading and writing about this book is that its not just a survival story, its a theme about humans that’s told THROUGH the survival story. The boys, the island, the conch, were all just things Goulding used to express his beliefs.

Here’s a little video on the summary of LOTF Incase you haven’t read it but want to know the plot!

STARTING THE PROJECT

So, as I mentioned earlier we had to create a presentation. But on what? We had to choose a tribe to compare to LOTF and with that, we had to answer the driving question. My group Adlih, Lucas, and Giorgia, and I decided on doing Hells Angels as our tribe choice.

We were a little worried at first when we started researching, because honesty there isn’t much information about them on the internet. A lot of the articles about them are very brief and kind of too picture perfect to be true. They are a tribe related to a lot of suspected crime and such, so its hard to find definite facts about them. But, we researched plenty and developed a good base of information. Here is some research we did!

We then split up the presentation between us four. Lucas was on overall research, Giorgia was on tackling the driving question, and Adlih and I split up the task of relating it to the book. I focused on the theme of how people are always looking for a sense of belonging, and Adlih focused on how humans look for a sense of protection and hierarchy. These are two themes we came up with by using the competency UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE CONSTRUCTION AND INTENT. This means through research and reading of the book we recognized the understood the roles and themes being shown. I wont go too the actual presentation as I have footage of the actual presentation, which I will show below. The evidence for this competency is the actual presentation which I showed earlier.

PRESENTING THE PROJECT 

So you’ve seen the video, but let me show you the deck of keynote slides we used! We all tried to choose photos that represent what we are saying well. These match up with the slides shown in the video.

Developing this project was surprisingly challenging. I thought because we had spent so much time on the book, and because we had so much research that it would be easy. I was wrong, the actual thinking part of this project and coming up with ideas and way it connects to the book, was hard. But, after much much thinking and talking about the book and Hells angels, we came up with points we felt were solid.

THE TEST

I know, I know, a test in PLP… Crazy. It wasn’t a regular test, more of just a timed assignment. We knew it was going to be 3 quotes from LOTF and we had to choose 2 to analyze. We had to talk about the plot surrounding the quote, the theme/significance of the quote, and any other connectors. I was nervous for the test but I knew I’d be okay because of my understanding of the book. So, here’s my responses on the test!

Being honest, I felt pretty confident while writing this test. I know I’m not the greatest writer ever, but I felt the points I was making were good and highlighted my LITERARY IDENTIFICATION AND ANALYSIS skills. (The bolded means curricular competency.) I feel a deep understanding of the characters and themes in the book and I hope it paid off in my test! 

OVERALL 

This was a very interesting and engaging project. Tribalism is something Ive never really thought about, so looking at it this much in a small period of time was a really big eye opener. I feel a strong understanding of tribalism in this. I also feel like I strengthened my writing process.

Lord of the Flies was honestly a really good book, and I have one thing to say before I go… Simon was the best character in the book. Bye bye!