In the book, “The Boys Who Challenged Hitler” by Phillip Hoose, the theme of resistance is very prevalent. The book is about a boy, Knud Pedersen, and his brother, Jens Pedersen, who absolutely despise the Germans who occupy Denmark, their country. They hate how their government didn’t resist at all and let the Nazis take over. They realized that if their government and their army wouldn’t do anything to fight the oppressors, they would. They started a group called the Churchill club, named after the British prime minister that they admired, Winston Churchill. The group operates mostly in secret, and they have trouble finding others to join, because they don’t know who they can trust to keep their secret, as many Danish people are in favor of the German occupation at the time. This club connect to the theme of resistance because it is about how these boys resisted accepting the German occupation. While their resistance wasn’t super effective short term, their club inspired many other Danes to rise up. Resistance doesn’t have to be with tons of weapons and waging military-style armed battles, and it doesn’t have to be doing anything like blowing up entire cars. However, the members of the Churchill Club were only teenagers, and they did steal weapons and smash or vandalize German vehicles. This connects to the reading I read yesterday about Denmark’s large resistance later in the War. One thing that they did was when they received word that all the Jews in Denmark were going to be shipped to extermination camps in Germany, they helped over 7,000 Danish Jews escape to Sweden, which was neutral. Those who couldn’t escape were hidden too. This makes me think that the while the Churchill club resistance didn’t do much immediately, they caused much greater things to happen.

In the book that I am reading, “The Boys Who Challenged Hitler” by Philip Hoose, one character has stood out to me, Jens Pederson. He is the older brother of Knud Pedersen, the “protagonist” of the story and the first person to suggest starting a club for sabotaging the German Army within their home country, Denmark.  The reason that Jens is significant is because he was the only person in Knud’s family that was in, or even told about, the Churchill Club. Knud didn’t tell either of his two younger brothers or his younger sister. Jens was also one of the first people who was in the club, as well as a very active member. Jens is the oldest in his family, and he is the “perfect child” from his parents point of view. He is neat, he did well in school, and he was, as far as his parents knew, very innocent. Knud Pedersen said, “My parents saved money to send Jens-the family golden boy-off to college. And who could blame them? Jens was already respected as the best math student at Cathedral School.”pg. 71 Furtheremore, within the Churchill Club, Jens is bold, but usually weighs all his options to make the safest choice. However, he does occasionally do something in the moment that may be a bad idea. The text reads, “At a skating rink, Jens had skated up behind a German Soldier and kicked him in the leg. The guy howled in pain and took off after Jens, who was chased down and taken to the police station.”pg. 74 This shows that while Jens is usually a person who thinks things through, he, like any human being, makes mistakes. The last significant detaail about Jens is that while he and his brother spend lots of time together, they do argue often and are very competitive, even though they are close.

“If the adults would not act, we would”- Knud Pedersen

This quote is significant for multiple reasons. First, it shows how devoted Knud and his friends in the RAF club and later, in the Churchill club, were. They would try to stand up for what they believed if no one else would do so. Second, it shows how they, even though they weren’t adults, wanted to make some kind of change in their lives and the lives of many other people. It is inspiring to many younger people, including me, because later in the story, the members of the Churchill club will use the limited resources they have as kids to start something way bigger than the club, a big rebellion against the German occupation. This quote stood out to me because even though it is short, it conveys its message simply and easily. Also, the quote foreshadows what happened in the book because the club members acted when the adults didn’t, and it caused a major ripple effect, where many other children and adults alike saw that there was this rebellion and wanted to help and make a change. And still, after the adults did act, the Churchill club didn’t stop and let them do the rest, they continued to do as much as they could until they were physically unable to. This quote can connect to larger thematic issues such as Patriotism. The boys wanted to act, and later did, because they felt that their government just let Hitler and the Nazis occupy their country, despite all the atrocities the Nazis were committing in Norway and other places they invaded. They wanted their Country to fight for itself, like how Norway was, because the way that Denmark handled the Situation made them feel bad to be in Denmark. The adults who were running the country decided to do nothing about the Nazis, so they were going to fix that by doing everything in their power to sabotage the Nazis.

Yesterday we presented our Capstone projects and I think mine went pretty well. But my family was mad because they didn’t want to sit and watch everyone’s Capstone, they just wanted to see mine. I had to wait 30 minutes until my presentation was up and mine was only 3 minutes long. While I was presenting I was very nervous but I didn’t make any mistakes. I think that the Capstone project will be helpful later on because when I am in high school or collage and I have to give a speech in front of a group of people I will know what to do because I had practice in middle school and Capstone. lastly I want to thank Ms. Boyer, Mr. Casal, and also my two interviewees Jaime Casap and James.

My class is doing a project about immigration. We are supposed to make a stop motion clip about immigration. For this project, the class was split into groups. My group is Jack F, Leo, and me. Each group had a topic. My group’s topic is immigration then and now. Our process is to do research, then we will start making our script, after that we will create our props for our stop motion clip.The next part is hard, we have to film our stop motion clip. It had to be at least 1 minute long and each second will have 12 photos. That’s 720 photos a minute.

Yesterday we had a snow day and I did nothing but played video games and watched tv. I played on my wii and on my phone and I did happen to go out for about 15 minutes. The one thing I did with my family was play this trivia game but it was from 20 years ago so most of the questions were out of date. That is pretty much all I did yesterday.

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Yesterday we had Rania’s dad come in and talk about money and how it has changed from salt or beets to gold and silver to paper money. He also explained the five main traits of money. He said it had to be able to be divided, it had to be portable, it had to be a little scarce so that it would have value.

Yesterday I finished a project in music where we used garage band and made our own songs and tried to make them sound like jaws. This is my Reflection.

I liked the garage band project because we got to use the ipads. I didn’t Use my EKG because I think that mine is is very inaccurate. It was fun to use garage band because you get to be creative.

Here is a link to my song.

Today Jackie Bastardi from Curious on Hudson came in and talked about mechanical  engineering. It was so interesting. In the beginning she talked about why she became a mechanical engineer. Later She talked about a lot of fun things she gets to do as an engineer. And at the end she showed my class how to make a kazoo out of straws, popsicle sticks, paper, and rubber bands. That’s all that you need. Also the kazoos worked really well and made a cool noise! I had a lot a lot of fun in this expert lecture and I look forward to the next one! 🙂

The kazoos looked a little like this.

On Friday Rush’s dad came in and talked about the Supreme Court. He said that he clerked for one of the nine justices. Did you know that there is a higher court than that, it is called the highest court in the land. It is a basketball court that is actually directly on top of the supreme court. Some times people play before or after a ruling. Mr. Schwartz also talked about some very famous cases like brown v. board of education. At the end he gave a a mini quiz and if we got most of the answers right we got a booklet of the constitution of the United States of America.