I think the book Speak is really good. I think it has an interesting plot line and good characters to keep the readers engaged. I like how the book has cliffhangers to keep the readers wondering what is going to happen next. I like how the author doesn't tell you right away what happened to make Melinda a social outcast. The author won't tell you the entire story of what happened at that party, and the author gives you bits and pieces of information throughout the story. I also think it's cool how Melinda found an abandoned janitor's closet and turned it into a safe little hang out place for herself.
I did have some questions about the story, though. I don't understand why everyone hates her so much just because she called the cops on a party where underage people were drinking. I don't get why people think that's a really big deal because I don't think that many people got busted for it anyway. Also, why does she chew on her lips so much, that she looks like she has some sort of lip disease? How do you chew on your lips that much to make they look that creepy? Melinda is a shy, timid girl who doesn't speak much. She barely has any friends, and is a social outcast at school. She doesn't really like to try that hard in school and likes to ditch class a lot. Heather is a loud, outgoing girl who is sort of friends with Melinda. She really wants to be popular so she tries to join the Marthas, while pulling Melinda along with her.
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Spring Break was kind of busy for me. I hung out with my friends most of the time since my family and I didn't travel anywhere this year. On Sunday, I went to Sky Zone, a trampoline park, with my friend, Zoe S. We jumped for about 3 hours. I had a lot of fun and then went home later where I just hung out in my room and watched TV. On Monday I hung around my house until later that evening where I went to a different friend's house for a sleepover with a few other people. It was really fun and we watched movies, played games, played hide-and-seek-in-the-dark, made s'mores, and tried to ride her hover board.
On Tuesday I went home after the sleepover and got ready to go hang out with Zoe. We went to Sycamore Mall with a few other people to watch a movie called Kong Skull Island. It was very interesting... We somehow ended up walking over to Petland to look at the animals there, and then walked to McDonald's and got a little bit of food. We stayed there for a while but got bored, so we walked back to the mall and just walked around in there for a while. The others left, so Zoe and I went back to her house for a sleepover. We watched TV, face timed some people, and did a whole bunch of other stuff. On Wednesday I went home and got ready because my dad was going to take me and my sister shopping at the Coralville Mall. That was fun and we ended up going to Barnes and Noble, PINK, Sephora, Bath and Body Works, and Scheels. My favorite thing about Scheels is that there is an escalator in it, so my sister and I went up and down that. On Thursday I just stayed home and relaxed. I mostly just read, watched TV, and did stuff on my laptop. I also ended up cleaning my room because it was a giant mess. On Friday I went to Great Clips with my mom and my sister to get a haircut. Then my mom dropped me off at Zoe's house because Zoe and I were going to another trampoline park, AirFX. We had a lot of fun there, too and spent a couple hours there. We went to a mall near AirFX after that and walked around. We both bought new phone cases. On Saturday and Sunday I didn't really do much so that was pretty much it. I had a lot of fun hanging out with my friends and family over Spring Break. I'm really glad that I got a lot of chances to hang out and have fun with my friends over Spring Break since usually I go out of town for Spring Break. 1) The similarities between Night and Boy in the Striped Pajamas are that they are both stories from the Holocaust. They both took place during World War II in a time period known as the Holocaust. They both talked about and showed examples of the propaganda that was being showed to the soldiers. They both talked about how the camps were definitely not as glamorous as the Nazis made them out to be. They both showed the viewers what happens when you were being taken to a gassing chamber: you're prodded into a gas chamber, told that you were just going to take a shower (so there wouldn't be a riot), and told to undress and leave your clothes on hooks. They also both showed examples of how poorly their clothes fit them and both showed you that the older prisoners used truncheons to keep the other prisoners in line. I think most of all the theme was similar in both. They showed you the bad parts that actually happened in the real Holocaust.
The differences between Night and Boy in the Striped Pajamas are that one of the stories was a true story and the other was a work of fiction. Night was a true story that Elie Wiesel was writing so everyone would know what really happened to the prisoners, whereas Boy in the Striped Pajamas was a work of fiction that an author wrote based on true facts from the Holocaust. Also in Boy in the Striped Pajamas the fences of the concentration camp seemed to be way less guarded than the ones in Night. In Boy in the Striped Pajamas they had an 8 year-old doing labor in a work camp, but in Night he said that younger children were sent to the gas chambers with their mothers. Also the tone of the stories were a little different. In Night is was a gloom and horrible things, but in Boy in the Striped Pajamas it was a little brighter because the two 8 year-olds were building a friendship in the midst of all the hate and war. 2) I'm going to analyze Bruno from Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Bruno is smart and cunning because he figures out how to lie to everyone and how to sneak around to go and visit Schmuel without getting caught. He is also brave because he was willing to go into the concentration camp to help Schmuel find his father. Also brave because I think he knew that he would get into a lot of trouble if his family found out that he was friends with a Jewish prisoner. He was curious and a good explorer because he went out into the woods to play and ended up finding the concentration camp that he thought was a farm. Bruno was a pale, German 8 year-old, with brown hair, icy blue eyes, and a bony body. You can tell that he was conflicted about what to believe about the Jews. He had people like his tutor, Gretel, and his father telling him that the Jews were evil and that they deserved to die, but then he meets a couple of Jewish people and he can tell for himself that they aren't evil at all. He finds out in fact, that he can be friends with a Jew. You can also tell that he is pretty clueless about what was really going on during the Holocaust because his mother wanted to keep him sheltered. He was the kind of person that did what he thought was right, and he thought that helping Schmuel and being friends with him was right. 3) I always thought the Holocaust was really bad for the Jews and the other prisoners, but I didn't really understand how bad it got for them until I learned about all the awful things that happened to them in the concentration camps. I think that I have a better understanding of what really happened to the prisoners and what it was like to be in a concentration camp. I used to think that they just killed most of the prisoners almost instantly, but I learned instead that most were tortured a lot and then had to work before they were eventually killed. 4) I liked Boy in the Striped Pajamas better. I think that this movie was better than Night because it was more entertaining. I feel like the movie really pulled you in and made you want to keep watching. Don't get me wrong, Night was a nice a read too and I really liked it but I just think the the movie was better. I think that Boy in Striped Pajamas was also better because it showed you what it was like for the families on both sides of the war. Like how clueless everyone was compared to some of the soldiers. 5) In the real Holocaust were the fences for the concentration camps more guarded than they were in Boy in the Striped Pajamas? Did soldiers and their families really live that close to concentration camps in the Holocaust like in Boy in the Striped Pajamas? Tough Questions
Page #77 After the 2nd selection, Eliezer met a rabbi from a small town in Poland. The rabbi would always pray to himself and read lines word for word from the Talmud, asking and answering his own questions to himself. One day the rabbi started talking Eliezer, and told that God is no longer with them. After that he than starts explaining what he means. He then asks tough questions about where God is, where God's mercy is, and how anyone-himself included-can believe in a God of Mercy. This makes me wonder about how tough it must of been for the prisoners. It really shows the readers how hard the concentration camps were on the prisoners if they started to give up their religion. Memory Moment Page #100 Eliezer tells how he saw a Parisian lady throwing coins to the "natives" who fought to retrieve them. When he notice that a couple of kids were trying to kill each other in the water over a coin, he tried to stop the lady, who thought of it as a fun game. Before Eliezer recounts this in his book, he tells a story about how when they were on a train traveling, they made a stop where there were German workers. One of them threw bread into the train car. Dozens of the prisoners fought over the bread while the workers watched the spectacle with a lot of interest. This memory is important because when he saw the Parisian lady throwing coins to make the kids fight it reminded him of when he was on the train and the workers were throwing bread to the other prisoners, who killed each other to get a piece of crust. This reminded him of the bad memories that came with the train car, so he begged the Parisian women to stop. Words of the Wiser Page #110-111 Eliezer's father is sick and is in the hospital. He is sick with dysentery, and he can barely eat the minimal amount of food that he gets now. Eliezer is trying to keep him alive, but it seems like he's fighting an uphill battle. He tries to get a doctor to look at his father, but the doctor refuses, saying that he is a surgeon and doesn't deal with dysentery cases. After a while, an older SS officer tells Eliezer that there isn't really anything that he can do for his father. He tells him that he should just concentrate on keeping himself alive instead of him and his father. The officer tells him that he should get his and his fathers food ration instead of the other way around. Eliezer of course doesn't listen and keeps trying to keep his father alive. The life lesson is that Eliezer takes from that talk with the SS officer is that even in really tough times, you can't let pettiness and hunger divide up your family. Even if Eliezer wanted to keep all the rations for himself on some level, he still decided not to, knowing that his father was all he had left. It affected Eliezer because it made him feel guilty for wanting to keep the rations all to himself. But it also affected him because it made him realize that he can't keep rations to himself and that he needed to keep his father alive. If I were President of the United States, I would make one of my priorities to make allies with as many countries as possible that could be useful to the U.S., and us with their country. This is important making allies with other countries will give us and them more products and other things. If we ally with another country they could be useful to us, like giving us natural resources and manufacturers/manufactured products. Also we could get help from that countries' military if we were to go to war somewhere. What I could do to make that happen is ask to speak to a certain countries's leader and to see if we could ally with each other. I think it would benefit the U.S. in many ways.
Another priority would be to minimize crime in the U.S. It's important because it is a serious problem in the U.S. There is a lot of different kinds of crime like human trafficking, kidnapping, drug smuggling/dealing, murdering, etc. Obviously there is a lot (more than I put on the list) and someone needs to put a stop to all this violence and crime. What I could to make this happen is to get more protection at borders where people smuggle in drugs and sometimes people, and I could get more police officers, especially in cities where there is a lot of crime (for example, Chicago). Finally, my last priority would be to mostly concentrate on making the U.S. better. It's important because this is our own country and we should concentrate on our own homes. I'm not saying the U.S. is good now, because it's not bad. But what I am saying is that things like pollution are getting out of hand. Animals are dying and water and ecosystems are becoming dangerous. Some bodies of water have so much pollution in them that animals die because they go in their looking for food like fish. Instead they eat and choke on pieces of plastic. What I could do to make this happen is to get people to clean up these polluted places and to help campaign to make these places better. These are my top three priorities that I would concentrate on if I were POTUS. While a lot of people go out of town for Christmas over Winter Break, my family and I stayed home for the holidays. My parents got a couple of vacation days, but for the most part it was just me and my sister hanging around our house. I spent most of the day doing things in my room and the evenings downstairs with my family and dogs. On Christmas it was just the four us at our house because the rest of my family lives in Ohio. We all opened our presents, and then called our relatives to wish them a Merry Christmas and to thank them for the gifts. It was really fun.
For Christmas I got clothes, gift cards, books, movies, makeup, and some other miscellanious things. On New Year's Eve I went shopping with my gift cards. We went to Kohl's first and I got some clothes there. We went to the mall next and went to Sephora, Barnes & Noble, and Scheels. I also got an Amazon gift card, which I bought more books with. After we were done with shopping, we went out for dinner at Olive Garden. It was really fun. Since it was New Year's Eve, I stayed up past midnight for the start of the New Year. My Winter Break was pretty chill, but it was really fun. The article, The 8 Life Skills all 18-year-old's Should Have: A checklist for Parents, is a list made of up of 8 things that 18-year-old's should know how to do before they go out into the real world. It is an article that is for parents to make sure that their own 18-year-old's know how to do these things before they move out of their parent's house and go out into the real world. It consists of things like knowing how to talk to strangers to being able to earn and manage their money.
I think that I am doing pretty well on this list so far. I already know how to do most of the 8 things that are in that list. I think that I need to work on learning how to talk to strangers. I somtimes get nervous when I talk to people I don't know or people that I just met. I'm better at talking to people that I know. Another thing that I think I need to work on is being able to take risks. Sometimes if I don't know the outcome of a situation, I won't want to do it. I'm more sure of myself and what I'm doing if I'm comfortable with what I'm doing, but I think that it would be better if I did more things that weren't in my comfort zone, like more risky things. I think these things in the list are realistic because I think that everyone should know how to do these things. I think that these things are important for an 18-year-old to know because they are just starting in the real world and you would fail in the real world if you didn't know how to do anything on this list. If I could live in any video game I think that I would choose Mario Kart Racing. I don't play video games that often, but I think this one is fun to play. I like playing this game for three reasons: I like the characters that you can choose to be, it's fun to try to beat the other characters, and I like how there are different levels with different scenes that you race through.
I like the characters that you can choose to be. There are so many options for the characters. I like that you can be whatever or whoever you want to be to race. If I lived in that video game it would be fun to interact with the other characters. Some of them look nice and some look more intimidating, so I would probably be friends with the girl characters more then the other ones. I also think that it would be fun to actually race against the characters and to try to beat them, too. I can sometimes be really competitive and I like to try to beat the other characters. I think that it would be fun to actually race in a real kart and to try beat all of the other characters while moving up and down the ranks. Finally, I like how each different level has a different scene and theme. I think that it would be fun to race in different places and see different things. I also think that it would be fun to race on different tracks and to see different things while you race and to have different challenges that you have to try to get around. These are the reasons that I would choose Mario Kart Racing to live in if I could pick any video game to live in. It's that Thanksgiving time of year once again and I have a lot to be thankful for. I'm going to tell you six things that I am thankful for. First, my family. They provide food, money, love, and shelter for me and for that I am thankful. My parents work hard to give me and my sister a good life and to make sure we have everything we need. Although we fight sometimes, I am thankful that I have my sister, who is smart and nice. Second, I'm thankful for animals. If this world didn't have any animals, life would be very boring. I ride horses, and if horses didn't exist, my life would not be complete. Also, I love all of my pets. My life wouldn't be complete with out my 3 dogs, 3 ferrets, rabbit, snake, 12 chickens, and all of my fish. Third, I am thankful for my education and school. A lot of girls in other countries don't even have an opportunity or a choice as to whether or not they get to go to school. I'm glad that I live in the US so that I get the opportunity to learn.
Fourth, I'm thankful for personal hygiene. If personal hygiene didn't exist, we would all be running around smelling like pigs in a pig pen. I'm thankful that most of us have the opportunity to smell good and not have B.O. Fifth, I am thankful for books. Books let us live in an alternate reality and let us explore different lives and adventures that we might not be able to do in real life. Books are great because it lets you put yourself in a character's shoes and have fun without leaving the comfort of your home. I think they are the best form of entertainment because they are so descriptive and a good book really pulls you in. Last, but not least, I am thankful for vehicles. If we didn't have vehicles we would have to walk everywhere and we wouldn't be able to get to some of the places that we go to everyday. It would also make it difficult to go to other states to see relatives or other things. Thanksgiving really makes you think about what you are thankful for. |
About KoraI love to ride horses and like to play volleyball. I also play the guitar, trombone, and the piano. Categories |