Throughout my first year, I learned how to communicate better, overcome difficult tasks, understand all types of literature, ways to use and improve my reading skills, and many other things. Each of these has affected my reading skills and how it has improved my first grade and beyond. Communication was one of the many things we learned to do in this course. As a group, we communicated in our literature circle, Empower3000, and our projects. During our literature circle, we were discussing study guide questions about the three books we read this year. While discussing the study guide questions, we could discuss what happened in the book and the main ideas and important details of the novels. In my opinion, the literature circle has been one of the best ways to help us improve our communication skills. During Empower3000, if we didn't know what a word was, we could ask each other for help. Besides not just asking my peers, I could ask Ms. Ramsey for help or understanding what the article or question was asking. Empower3000 was the best way to improve our reading skills. At first, it was difficult for me to read and understand more difficult literatures for a while, but after Empower3000 and reading the three novels in class, it helped me understand and understand more difficult literatures. Even though the summaries became outdated and took forever, it helped me come up with good answers because I could refer to my summaries and see what stood out in each paragraph. At the beginning of the year, I took a pretest and found that I was reading at a fourth grade reading level. At the end of the year, I took a post-test and found out that I was reading in college......in the middle of a sheet......guide questions. Another thing I struggled with was understanding certain words or phrases in the novels we read. I then started using SQ3R and researching what words/phrases were needed to understand the text. Even though this class may seem difficult and there was a lot to do, which it sometimes was, we had a lot of fun reading! The Friday draw, the quarter draw, the weekly challenges, the exile and grade goals, the challenge goals, and sometimes candy were simply given to us. I can say a lot of candy was eaten during reading class this year, but we worked hard and we earned it. While facing challenges and goals, candy was just a motivation for us to achieve our goals and challenges. Although this school year is coming to an end, it is not the end of my reading skills, as they will continue to improve as school progresses..