Introduction-+Dear+Reader

Dear Reader,

In all my years at school, I have never had a project that allowed me to choose any topic at all to research.Ever since I was a little boy I have loved the game of basketball. I have always been so interested in topics such as, where the game originated, how the game originated, who invented the game, why they invented the game and how the game has changed since it was created. When I heard that I was allowed to research anything for this project, I knew it had to be something that I was really interested in because if it wasn't I would not be motivated to do the best work I could on the project. When picking my topic, I was first thinking of doing a historic war or event. Then I decided that I do a lot of projects on history and it would probably be boring. Then I thought I would research a species of animals like snakes or dolphins, so I wrote snakes and dolphins down on my list of possible research topics. Next I was thinking of doing a unique topic like origami or karate, so I added those to my list. Lastly, I tried to think about a topic that I was really interested in and that I had some background information on. That is when it came to me, I knew I was interested in sports and I knew a lot about them. I was debating whether to put down football or basketball down as my fifth possible topic for research, but I ended up choosing basketball because I play basketball and I like it a little bit more than football. I was almost certain that I wanted to choose basketball as my topic, but I just wanted to give it another day to think about it. My thoughts didn't change one bit and I chose to research basketball, which was a good choice because I learned a lot and had fun doing it!

The hardest genre for me to compose was the narrative story because it took a lot of hard work and time. However, I enjoyed writing my story because I was able to control everything that happened. At the beginning of writing the story, I didn't know how I was going to make a character. But once everybody said what they were doing I realized that my character was going to have to be someone that witnessed the creation of basketball. After thinking about this I decided to make my character a student at the YMCA school who played in the first basketball game. I didn't feel that this was complete enough though. I knew that for my character to be interesting he had to do something special in the story so I decided to have him score the first basket ever. From there, the story kind of pieced itself together as I went along.

After completing the narrative, I knew that I had to complete four other genres. The first genre that I created was a six room poem because we learned about them in class and I found mine to be pretty good with a few refinements and corrections. Then I saw some of the other students getting a mini-lesson on lists, which gave my the idea to make a to-do list and it wasn't hard deciding who I was going to make write the list because I knew that I wanted James Naismith, the inventor of basketball to write the to-do list. After writing a to-do list for him I wanted to make another aspect of the project include him in it. The next day in class, we learned about some more possible genres and one of them was a journal entry and I knew that I wanted to have James Naismith write a journal entry, but the question was when and about what. After a few minutes of thinking I decided that I wanted him to write it on the day of the first basketball game and about how life has been since he created basketball and how he created it. Now I only needed to complete one more genre, but the problem was that I had no idea what the genre was going to be. At first I thought maybe I would try to write a newspaper article from 1891 about the creation of basketball, but I thought that would be too much about Dr. Naismith and I already had two entire genres about him. I remained without a clue for what my last genre was going to be. However, the next day in class a few of my classmates were attending a mini-lesson about movie posters, so I decided to listen in. And boy, am I glad I did! That was going to be my fourth genre. It was perfect, none of my other genres were similar to it, it wasn't too difficult and I knew how to find the perfect old fashion basketball pictures for the poster.

I had finally completed my four final genres and I was up to date on my process journal, with two whole days until the project had to be turned in. I decided to spend some time formatting and then I realized that I hadn't created my repeated element yet. I began to panic a little bit, but once I began working on it I knew that I was going to finish with plenty of time to spare because all I had to do was find a few pictures that were meaningful and had to do with basketball. So I did exactly that and it worked out for me. I still had two days to finish the project and I was already done so I thought I would create a sixth genre to improve my project a little bit. I knew how much I liked the first poem that I wrote so I wanted to write a second. Then I did a little research on poems and came to the conclusion that I wanted to write and if poem about the criteria of being a star. I found myself stuck so I turned on the TV to watch the Celtics pregame show. I thought that the announcers would say some meaningful lines that would prompt me to come up with other lines, and they did. It turned out to be a great idea.

Although the research process was boring, I did my best on it because I knew that it would make the rest of the project easy. The facts from the research allowed me to create my genres quicker and easier, which helped a lot in the scheme of things. I really enjoyed creating this project because it was really fun and I learned a lot during it!