Opinion Writing

Right now, we are in the middle of the unit about Opinion Pieces. I really am enjoying this unit so far. We get to read different articles about interesting topics and get to take notes, find the main idea and finding the supporting details. Our first activity was going on a website called "Rotten Tomatoes" and watched movie trailers and reading the reviews. My favorite movie trailer and reviews was on Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. Here is the link to the movie trailer, website and reviews:

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/miss_peregrines_home_for_peculiar_children



My opinion is I like this website, because it talks about different people's opinions on movies and it's really cool. These are the other trailers:


 https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/middle_school_the_worst_years_of_my_life


https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/queen_of_katwe_2016


https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/storks/

Goals- And how I'm doing

This is my page about goals that I have agreed to do. In each box, I wrote the goal, how I am going to achieve this goal, and when I would like to achieve this goal. Here is that page:                                                                                                                                                                                                             2016 Beginning the Year...Setting Goals   

Goal:  I will type without looking at the keyboard!

I have 3 steps to achieve this goal. My first step is that I will practice Sense Lang 10 minutes a day and really work hard as I practice and do my best! My second step is that I will type a 2 page writing piece each Thursday (because I don’t have ASA’s on Thursday) to practice typing in complete sentences, so that way I can also practice spelling, grammar, and punctuation. The last step to achieve this goal is that I will always log my practice, WPM and accuracy rate, so I can see when I improve! I hope to achieve this goal by the end of the year!!

Goal:  I will mark assignments done on google classroom more often (if I did it)

My plan to achieve this goal: 1. On Todoist, I will write down everyday: Mark assignments done on google classroom 2. Write on a sticky note and put in my laptop case, so when I do my homework, I'll remember to mark it done. 3. Write down at home on my whiteboard: "Mark homework done on google classroom" I hope to achieve this goal AT LEAST by April Break!

Goal: Be more ON TIME to school.

To achieve this goal, I have a plan. My first step to achieving it, is setting an alarm clock for 7:15 every morning and trying not to sleep through it or just turn it off and get back into bed (true story by the way). My second step is getting out my clothes every night before hand so that way I automatically know what to wear and quickly get dressed. And the final step is only dropping off Logan on days that I am on time (which I will try my best to do). I wan't to finish this goal ASAP!

November: So far, I think that I have accomplished my goal about being more responsible for my materials, because now that I'm keeping track of my materials and that I got a new pencil case, I'm not loosing my materials anymore. I also a achieving my enjoying the journey goal, but I feel like I need to record my feelings more, so I'm going to keep that goal and my typing goal.

December: I think I'm achieving Enjoying the journey but I feel like I need to still mark google classroom assignments done more often (on time) so that way I don't have to skip my recess time. My typing goal is so so. I have been practicing hard and often but I still have a habit on not keeping them on the home row. But it's more comfortable for me moving my fingers, and if I'm not, it takes me about an hour to write a sentence!

January: For my first goal, I am improving much on typing but I still feel like when I move my fingers, I am very fast and I sometimes can do it without looking!! Maybe I should still keep this goal until April Break. For my second goal, I am doing so-so on it. I am turning some things in on google classroom but not ALL of the assignments. I have problems with marking things down on IXL though. I think I have completely achieved my 3rd goal (enjoying the journey) because I am happy now because of our new units and drama after school program! My new goal should try to help me with my IXL math habits.

February: My first goal is going a bit better. I still feel WAY more comfortable when moving my hand around the keyboard instead of on the home row and all proper and everything. I still enjoy my unique way of typing. I probably will have to improve more but I think my way is more for me. I have done well on my second goal, because I'm marking things done more often but maybe another section of break to accomplish it. For IXL, I am now enjoying it, especially section "L" so I'm going to change that goal, because I enjoy IXL more and do it more often now.

P.E Team Building Activities- Titanic

The first pre unit in P.E was team building activities. The purpose of team building activities is to practice working in teams, making friends, learning to play games, and building teams for the next upcoming units. One of the team building activities was the activity "Titanic". This game's rules:

• You may only have one scooter, one jump rope, two mats on 2 different sides and a bench
• Only one person on your team can touch the ground
• If a person touches the ground and they're not aloud to touch the ground, you must go back to the begging mat

Objective: Get from the begging mat "Titanic" to the ending mat "Rescue Boat". 

Before we started the activity, each team had to make a plan. Here is a picture of my team, making our plan;

After we planned, we got straight into action. Andrey (On the green scooter), was the person we chose to be able to touch the ground. He would take one of us on a scooter and pull us to the bench, and onto the ending mat. Once he rescued people to the other side, we would go back to pull more people. On the bench, the people who were already rescued, help pulled people off of the scooter, safely, without touching the floor. Here is me, Thomas, and Isabelle helping Ryan to the bench, safely.

I really enjoyed this activity and it helped me to develop skills in helping others, making friends and making a plan. I know that I grew a lot during these activities by cooperation. I think the learner attitudes and attributes for this activity were:

• Communicator
• Cooperation
• Thinker
• Risk- Takers
• Confidence
• Open- Minded
• Creativity
• Balanced

I hope to do this activity again! Thanks you Mr. Buggs!!!!

First Unit of Inquiry

 Our first Unit of Inquiry of the year was about Governance and Citizenship. The central idea of this unit was; 

Governance and Citizenship are interconnected and impact rights and responsibilities. We learned about governance and citizenship and how they are interconnected. 

One of the activities was interviewing our parents about our home government. I interviewed my dad about the U.S government. After the interview, we created a google slideshow with the information we learned about in our interview, and presented it to 3 other classmates (while someone was recording my slideshow presentation). I think the leaarner attitudes and attributes in this activity are:  Creative  Communicator  Thinker   Inquirer    Here is my slideshow;



Another activity we did in this unit was that we created our own civilization. We did this activity to learn about how civilizations work, who owns or controls the resources in the civilization. We had a choice to create our civilization on minecraft (c)  or draw a map of our civilization. I chose to draw a map instead. The learner attitudes and attributes in this activity I think were:  Creative   Communicator   Knowledgeable.   I really liked this activity because we got to be sooo creative and got to draw our own country, basically! I think that this unit helped me understand the importance of being a good citizen and what citizenship means. It also helped me realize what is going on in my world today about the governments.                                                                  I hope to do something similar again!

Introduction to the 1st writing unit

For our first writing unit we wrote fiction pieces. I wrote a realistic fiction piece called My Aunt's Will- The lost tomb .  In this unit we learned different editing skills such as punctuation, spelling, grammar and present, past and future tense.                                                                                                                                             We also learned about Planting Seeds . Planting seeds are different ways of finding ideas to write about. Some planting seeds were:  Things I like, Things I don't like, things that disgust me, things that scare me, things that make me mad. My favorite thing that we learned is how to change words from "said" and "asked" to more interesting words, like exclaimed, demanded, questioned etc.
   Here is the link to my writing piece:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BQqDRfBjrlkYBkA6etzLCLRVB8mrUcj6omU69APOwYU/pub

    I really enjoyed this writing unit because we got to choose what type of writing we got to write about and I also really like this unit because I finished 17 books on the 39 clues and I got inspired to write a book similar to the 39 clues.
   Holly Lewis edited my piece and vice versa. It taught us about being an editor and putting our editing skills to actually edit someone's piece! It was a lot of fun and I hope that I edited Holly's piece correctly for her to publish!

African American Slave Art

For or art unit in March, we started to measure lines on a paper to cut out designs on a piece of paper to make a piece of a quilt from the Under Ground Railroad. In the underground railroad, people who worked in the railroad, they would hand up a quilt on their front porch as a secret code to the slaves! The quilt I made is called the Log Cabin. The Log Cabin means that the house that has the quilt is a safe house! It also means that there are friends that are also slaves there to meet you as well! In the quilt, there are 4 strips of yellow and 4 strips of pink. There are a lot of spaces in between the strips because we wanted people to see more of the background color! It took a lot of erasing lines, re-gluing strips, washing my hands, there are a lot of parallel lines from all of the strips because I had to glue strips close to each other! All of the strips on my artwork are all quadrilaterals!