When we were told we had to do a Ted Talk my mind went to Robotics first. I had some experience making slides but not much in speaking. I had to figure out how to make eye contact, make it funny, and speak with a clear and loud voice. I started out with doing research and then I made the slides and practiced. When it was time for me to share one of my interests I was so nervous but I knew I had to do it so, I took a deep breath and started talking. As I kept on talking about different things and I got less nervous. A hard part of this was speaking and doing a presentation. My slides were nice and I knew what I was saying. I had some notes but not much. I had practiced and the words just came to me. I spoke with a clear voice, I had some humor and I had eye contact. In the end, I hit the mark of 5 minutes exactly. I was so excited to be done and not have to worry about doing a presentation anymore.
In The Westing Game Turtle Wexler wanted to invest in stocks. When she did this, we also set up a stocks sheet with Mrs. Sprague. We all started with $20,000. You might think this is a lot but this is completely fake and we didn’t truly buy stocks. We have been doing this project for over a month now and have just finished. During this time, I saw my stocks go up and down. In the end, I only made around $95. In the end, only a couple people ended up actually making money and most of us lost money.
Our first class novel was called The Last Cuentista. This book was about a girl who wanted to be a storyteller but couldn’t because she would be relocated. Even though she could have been caught and then later purged like her parents she kept on telling the stories anyway. I think that keeping stories alive is not just remembering them and then telling them later so that only a couple people know but sharing the stories with everyone. Even if you tell the story to a couple of people it can still keep it alive because they can also choose to keep it alive.
We have done many projects in Language Arts and have done many more such as reading another class novel called The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin and doing a detective notebook on it. But in this blog post we only covered our ideal world, book project and The Last Cuentista.
Brightest Night