Reading

A little less than a month ago, my teacher, Mrs.Edwards announced that we were going to be doing a debate project with our book club. I was really excited because I love doing debates. Each book club got a folder with articles about their topic, I was a bit disappointed to find out that my group was doing Cell Phones. But later on, when I was doing my research I found out that the Cell Phone debate had pretty solid reasons. The question we were debating was “Should kids be allowed to use cellphones in school.”

My book club group worked really hard on making reasons and evidence for both sides. After we finished all the work Mrs.Edwards gave us sides and teams for the debate. My partner was Christian, we were up against Devon and Trevor. Our side was yes, cell phones should be allowed in school. 

Christian and I picked 2 good reasons why cell phones should be in school. The first one was Cell phones can be used as a learning tool, and the second reason was that Cell phones make it easier for kids to keep in touch with their parents. We immediately started working on evidence after we picked our reasons. 

I struggled a little when it came to unpacking the evidence but my teacher and Christian helped a lot. My main source of information was an article called pros and cons of having cellphones in school. 

After Christian and I finished our evidence we started working on some good counterarguments. Cyberbullying, which was Devon’s reason for why cellphones should not be in school, was hard to counter. This is because there really is no excuse to cyberbully, but Christian and I tried our hardest. 

At our first practice debate, we had quite a lot of critiques. We were reading our script on a Chromebook so some people said that we needed to lift our heads up a bit, some said we needed to strengthen our evidence, but mostly we did great. On the last and final recording of our debate, I was anxious, I didn’t know if we were ready. But I shouldn’t have worried because we did a fantastic job. 

The debate unit was definitely a hardworking team project. My favorite part of the project was probably researching. I liked finding different ideas for the evidence. I really hope that we do another debate unit in fifth grade.

This is the story of a ten year old boy named Little Willy who lives with his grandfather. One morning his grandfather does not get out of bed and Little Willy is nervous he is sick. He goes and gets the doctor, Doc Smith to see if she can help. Doc Smith says that he does not want to live. Little Willy finds out that they are broke and does everything he can to make money. Grandfather is still not behaving like himself. Then they discover that Grandfather owes 500 dollars in taxes. So Little Willy enters a race to win the money to save the farm.