This week at school we did something called a Nerdy Derby. The Nerdy Derby was when people from curious on Hudson came to let us construct our own cars and race them. My car won all races. We built the cars using a small wooden rectangle base, then hot gluing two metal poles(axels) with wheels on them to the base. That was just the start of our cars. We mostly added materials to our cars, I added a big round ball to the middle-back of my car and taped it down, this also let my car flip a 360 degree at a bump at the end and still continue on. This was a very fun project that let us learn more about friction, speed and weight.

Fish In A Tree by Lynda Mullaly Hunt. Ally the protagonist has dyslexia. Dyslexia a reading disorder makes it so that it’s difficult to read and interpret the words but still have a normal amount of intelligence. Ally tries to hide her reading disability and sometimes is very shy, especially around school where kids laugh at her, but ally is also is a troublesome kid at school when she tries to do the right thing and hide her dyslexia, but she does the wrong thing and gets in trouble. one time Ally got a card for her teacher who was pregnant and got the card because it had yellow flowers but couldn’t read the card and it was actually a sympathy card. When Ally is alone she always thinks about her problem and school. Ally also thinks about the next day of school and what she’s going to do when she’s at school.

Yesterday, me and Max had some great ideas for Rube Goldberg but came out unsuccessfully, we tried and tried and took so long and only got a bit done. That was an unsuccessful Playdate but at the end we got much more ideas! I hope they will serve useful to us.

In class we are reading A Long Walk To Water by Linda Sue Park. We started to talk about what skills you require to become a leader. Being a leader requires you to be brave, strong, to have perseverance and be trustworthy, confident, patient and more. You have to be brave and strong to protect people, you have to prove yourself trustworthy because if you agree to a deal, you can’t break it, people have to trust you and see you as a great leader. Confidence is always needed for a leader without that they might fail at tasks or give up, and they will never be able to face real challenges. You will definitely need patience, have patience, don’t give up if something is hard, work with it even if it takes time. This is what it takes to be a leader.

Salva the protagonist demonstrates these qualities because he is brave and strong. When his uncle died he had no more family members with him, and after that not even friends, he had to beg other people for food until he reached the refugee camp. He never cried along the way to the camp and just kept walking. Salva had also perseverance, confidence and patience, he kept walking to the refugee camp across the desert in the hot weather with barely any water, having some hope that he would find a family member in the camp. Even in the camp after a day he still had confidence and had hope in himself that he could find a family member in the camp. At the start of the book when they split the men and women and children up, he had confidence to go to the men’s side to where he would become a soldier and show he was strong. Salva demonstrates himself as a leader throughout the book.

Salva’s philosophy might help me in my life by setting an example to me of his bravery and persistence and all his leadership skills. My problems would be easier in life to do things bit by bit, also having confidence in myself.

Perseverance is very important in everyone’s life because if Salva didn’t have perseverance, he would have never made it through the desert. Talking about the long one year and a half walk from Ethiopia to Kenya! Salva would never have survived without perseverance. In my life I would have failed in projects, chess, piano and many more without perseverance. This is why perseverance is important.

To better develop my ability to persevere I should gain more confidence in myself, work harder, and having more patience. If I gain more confidence I would be able to tell myself, Alex you can do this, and maybe I will listen to myself and grow my ability to persevere. If I work harder and have more patience, I will be used to working hard and not giving up and that will help my ability to persevere.

Today is day two of filming! Me Max and Harry (Our group) worked very well today. There were some problems at the start but we solved them. Today we finished our whole introduction. Harry our group member bought some paper letters at Michael’s and we did some stop motion with that to make our title and who it’s by. First the the word Transportation flies in from the right to left then wind blows it away. After that the two words come in from both sides saying in immigration then they crumple up into a pile. After that the the words by Harry Max Alex spread out of the pile. So the intro says Transportation, In immigration, by Harry Max Alex. I am looking forward to more filming!

Today we just started doing our filming for immigration. We are filming in a way that is called stop motion animation. If you are wondering what that is stop motion animation is when you take loads of pictures. Then you will take your photos and put them together to make a animation. For the past two to four weeks we were working on our immigration research and scripts we chose the topic transportation. It was hard, we also had to make props and a green screen. Today we successfully to a lot of pictures and made a title animation where words appear on the screen. There were some arguments though in the process, it was also hard to get the camera’s angle perfect, but other than that today we had some great progress and a good learning experience.

We finally finished our whole rube Goldberg it took so long, it is really interesting check it out you should check it out here! https://wevideo-a.akamaihd.net/2018_01_31_05a53eff-83e3-415e-ab1f-24b75d2dd28e_360p?X-Amz-Security-Token=FQoDYXdzEH4aDD7IRcvY%2Fdx7Dh974yK3A74ZDl0%2BKpwCN4ImVNlOnAtajDgLWjHSieVak2y71frAmv7kWHmzu49Drrb7O4id1zp2Apdc8du9nHODXamgjtNuJzlxMTX9mNqGs2PapvEGmHagXj2KhFshhvKWrJrCEWddUC%2Fs39PwU6HiWypNi1bLnhN43DIMb%2FOiqhJ71QfVZMYjtetXT9I8SHXcNwNlX3%2BiK%2FctN1k%2FTRtPmwkVtx13GPUw7jmWnB3ydulG4cfycRdCL2RN9Wrr2IMUBLM4BMj4rSzH7eRySmv%2Bq6zDeGZCkxgbPx%2FhdeEpzh14kPV8WvOCGLd45lTLwrBOfcdWY6g%2B2hAzbazOtoEraX3VoRKqgWsVljgaIGlxGkLEFxPyXe%2BGMwGRCmk%2FpikVYvofShHspudMpc%2Fu9jG%2FK%2BhNVIQ6phG0d4FfXvBxaY%2FiC2EZfKzIxmTH4YV8js4%2FsNeR%2BlUGPLDqxc%2B%2FGyIQ0BzpRI3irhKuyGd%2FMcN6%2B0l%2BuG%2F7OWtP5JotrXcecb3zaSEZ8ubiSiWf3yC2g3i4tgbpxEl30Ch5iD81zkFXm1%2FeHdc8u%2FFexT2YhqEKTE06XnpyLOsQPWHIhkQoxs2S1AU%3D&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20180214T215652Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=518400&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAIEI3O34D7AAQLNOQ%2F20180214%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=b8e48ee36c510fc9f6db72c762034077fde0f563668790cd69b8968e9e2d5329. It was tiring work, and the bad thing was we could rarely have playdates, but the end result was quite good. I hope you like it!

In rube Goldberg there is always a big chance that you will mess up. In the process of our rube Goldberg we messed up many times. For us we tried every step carefully before we put it all together so that it would be much easier at the end. But doing those steps took a long time and quite some hard work. A lot of our ideas were failures but we eventually managed to make some work. Rube Goldberg takes time and effort. You need to be very patient doing it.

We just finished our rube Goldberg now all we have to do is edit our videos. Our rube Goldberg is very cool in it first we roll a ball down a tube, it hits dominoes then hits a box. The box is on a table end then it falls down onto the floor, the box hits a domino and causes all the others to fall. Then one domino hits a mini catapult which rolls a ball off into a track, then the ball hits dominoes again and the dominoes fall which hits some stacked dominoes and those cause a domino to fall with a string attached to it and a pulley and the cage. Applying enough force the string pulls on the cage door and opens it. I think this rube Goldberg is very good.

Last week Mrs. Boyer talked about Rube Goldberg, I was very excited to hear about it. I decided to be partners with Max, the first half week we got nothing accomplished but now we are starting to build it! I am worried that it will take to many attempts to make it work but I hope not.