Category: Writing

Ready. Set. CURL!!!

Jennie # #

You put the slider under your foot and start to push the stone back. You push the stone, let go, 

and the sweepers start to sweep the ice. It goes into the house, and your team cheers. You just scored a point in curling. I will be writing a reflection about when my class went on a field trip to Ardsley Curling Club. I will be writing about delivering the stone in my first paragraph, and sweeping in the second. I had a good time there but there were also challenges. For example, both of our teams couldn’t get the stone into the house until my team FINALLY got one, and then another but there were no more points afterwards. I think that curling is really fun if you follow instructions so you won’t hit your head since THAT is definitely no fun at all.

 

To deliver the stone, we practiced at school. There were these stones on wheels and there was a miniature house in the gym. We would practice like that and it was very easy, but it got harder when we did it on the ice. A lot harder. A lot lot harder. A lot lot lot harder. Ok, I’ll stop rambling, let’s continue. We had to use the stabilizer and I still fell but after a while, I got the hang of it. You had to sort of lunge/kneel when you were delivering it, while you had a slider underneath the foot opposite of your dominant hand, so if you are a righty, you put under your left foot, and if you were a lefty- basically you get the idea. You held the stabilizer in your non-dominant hand and the stone in your dominant hand. You put your other foot on a thingamabob and push your stone and foot with the slider backward, then forward and then slide on the ice. Wait! This is important. You might be thinking you can let go whenever you want but nope! If you let go too early or late, you will fall and the stone won’t go as far. It is very important so that you can get the stone into the house. When I fell a few times, I thought, Am I the next Sophie Foster? Sophie Foster is a character in my favorite book series, Keeper of the Lost Cities, who trips A LOT. A LOT LOT. A LOT LOT LOT. Ok, ok, I promise I’ll stop rambling in this whole reflection then. At once, when I tripped, my knees felt frozen though they weren’t, don’t worry. What a way to hurt my leg I thought.

 

Sweeping is a very important part in curling. No, you don’t take the bus back home and sweep the floor of your room so you can win in curling, though your parents will be happy and mad. Why? Your floor will be clean but your parents will be like “What the heck are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be at school?” When you sweep, you rub the broom on the ice, causing friction and the ice to be a little more slippery so the stone can slide on the ice farther. You can sweep a lot but don’t over sweep it! If you over sweep it, it can go out of the house, so maybe stop sweeping like a third meter away from the house? When we were waiting for the other class to finish, there was this really good shot but then people over swept it and I was thinking, Well, THAT is just so sad. Anyways, you might be thinking, if the ice is sweeped so many times by so many people, why doesn’t the ice melt? Well, you’re only causing friction to make VERY slightly slippery. It’s also cold there so it will turn cold again eventually, think of it as an ice skating rink, why didn’t the ice melt from all the friction with all the ice skating shoes? You also might be wondering, how come you don’t slip? Well, if you were running, especially with a slider, you would trip a lot. The thing is, the ice isn’t flat so there are bumps on the ice so you don’t trip as much and the stone can still slide. How the slider works is if your shoes are a little flat at the bottom, it will slide because, well, it is flat and can slide around the ice! This is why we have sliders, so we can slide more to deliver the stone farther. There is also more to curling that is kind of important to win for example, the hammer which is having the last shot so you can knock the other team’s stone away or knock your own into the house if it’s a little close to the house but not in yet.

 

This is why I think curling is fun, since you get to slide on the ice and score points when you get it in the house. It is also about good sportsmanship like every sport does. Before the game, you say good curling to the other team, when someone makes a good shot in the house, you say good shot, and when the game is over, you fist bump the other team and say good game. Not everything is about being competitive, it’s about having fun with everyone. What do YOU think about curling?

Categories: 5th Grade, WritingLeave a comment

Feature Article Reflection

Jennie # # #

Have you ever written an article? If you haven’t, it is very fun but complicated. Okay, I’ll take that back. VERY complicated. I wrote an article about how to find books you will like reading by level and which stories you like. Read more to find out the process of making an article.

The first few parts are writing, writing, and writing some more. Everyone needs a topic because, if there are no topics, what would even write about? To pick the topics, it needs to be something you know about because here, we are doing this for writing, not research, BUT if you need a fun fact, you can do a quick research for some (I don’t have a fun fact though). My topic is books because I love to read books. After drafting everything, you need to revise and come up with a title, subtitle, and before the writing (I forgot to  mention), the name of each section. After all that, You need to revise A LOT. It’s because of if it makes sense, spelling, and if there is a big gap or something because that is important when you start to format. When you are pretty much done, you could go format.

For formatting, I think I took more time than writing. For formatting, you need to play around with shapes very much. Our formatting part is on new slides because we were using shapes and it will be WAY easier. The reason we’re using shapes is because if you use a text box, when the text box is full, it makes the text smaller than it is supposed to. After you decide how you are arranging the shapes, you have to copy and paste the text into the shapes. The shapes have to be either square or rectangle. When you like your formatting with the text so far, you get to find images! BUT you can only search from creative comments or then you are basically stealing an image. If you can find no images about your topic, you find it the normal way but you have to type “search for:____” and then “Website:____” and then what you searched for after the search on top to replace the blank space after “search for”, copy and paste the website where the image came form and paste it where it has a blank space after “website” and write them in the captions. The normal text has to have one size, all the names of topics and subtitles should be one size, the title is one size, the captions is one size, and the text feature text size is one size. I know it is confusing but it is not impossible for sure. After all that, you need to revise, revise, and revise MUCH MORE (just in case!). When you finish revising, read to double check if it makes sense. IF you are completely sure, give it to a teacher to check! Though it was really hard, everyone finished their articles!

In conclusion, writing an article isn’t typing a bunch of words, adding pictures, and printing it. It is so much more than that, it is writing important information, formatting the article to look good, and adding images that match the information given in the article. So if you write an article about something, think about all the important things you need to add to your article!

Categories: 5th Grade, Technology, WritingLeave a comment

Bedford Ropes Course Reflection

Jennie # #

Have you ever gone to a ropes course before? If you haven’t yet, and you like teamwork and fun, you should try it if you can. It is so fun and challenging and you need teamwork to solve some of them. You also learn new strategies every time you try again when you fall off or do it wrong.  Today, I will write about my experience at the Bedford Ropes Course and what happened and what we learned when doing it.

I’m going to talk about my three favorite challenges at the ropes course. My first favorite was the Indiana Jones Challenge but it was really challenging and you REALLY needed a good strategy like when you get on the thin beam, scoot on it with your butt and not walk on it in case you fell from losing your balance.The goal was to go around the whole entire thing and ask your teammates that had gone through for tips on how you do it. You also needed to be careful about where you were stepping because if you stepped somewhere that was in thin air and not the beam then BOOM! You would fall down to the ground. You definitely need to keep your balance or else you will fall flat on your feet or if you were getting on to something like a beam, you fall and hurt yourself pretty badly (I kind of did). You need to do it slowly in order to steady yourself and keep in balance, remember, patience is key. (The thing is though I only got to the beams because I fell at the last beam so I only got through that so if you ever go there, good luck on the other parts!) We tried to ask the people that had gone through the beams if they could tell us how they did it but they were focusing on the wire part and they couldn’t here us from where they were.  My second favorite is the Rope Bridge Challenge, the goal is that we really need to be patient on this one because we were not allowed to accidentally touch other people or the ground because then we would be out and would have to start all over again, so we needed to bend over and walk over the people that were bending their bodies and we had to do it slowly. The goal was to go touch the tree on the other team’s side and the other team were trying to touch our tree (there was no winning or losing thing, it was just teamwork with the whole team but we had to split into two groups). You had to be careful and communicate like saying “Can you bend over?” or “I will bend over” and similar things. You also really need to be patient so that you don’t accidentally run into someone or do something too fast so that you could still stay on and not be out. My third favorite is the Mohawk Walk. The goal was to get your group to a black square by walking on wires that was securely connected on to trees. At first, my group butt scooted (scooting on their butt) since we couldn’t balance on the wires but then one of us came up with this idea of while walking on the wires, we could hold hands and the person near the tree, clinging on to the dear life of EVERYBODY, to balance ourselves, but that didn’t exactly go as we planned, because after all people were on the tree, we were stuck there so people kept shouting “Help!” and “Scoot slowly!” and “But I can’t!” and things like that. So we just continued to butt scoot. The only problem (well, two actually) was it was SO painful that people started saying ouch while butt scooting. Another was flipping over and upside down. Since we did not have helmets, people clung on to for avoidance of their head cracking apart, even though that definitely wouldn’t happen. In the middle, people were allowed to come off and help other people even though we didn’t know how to help them most of the time. At the end, I was thinking how do people make things look so easy? Especially this one! 

I learned A LOT of things. Not a lot but A LOT as in A LOT LOT (basically very very much). I have a feeling that other people in the grade also learned A LOT that maybe we could even win a prize for “grade that has learned the most things in 24 hours”. I’m going to name three so that this blog post isn’t 1,000,000,000,000 pages long (I even doubt that all that I learned isn’t that long but I guess it would still be very long). First, I learned that YOU NEED PATIENCE, it is very important because you can never get anything done by rushing. For example, if you rushed through the WHOLE ENTIRE ropes course, by the time you come back, you will be bruised and scratched, a sprained ankle and maybe even a broken leg! Second thing is you should encourage your teammates so they will feel more confident (it did not happen with me but I saw my teammates feel good about themselves so I encouraged people a few times though I regret not doing it a lot). Third thing is to find a strategy, like, if you fall off it’s ok just remember what you did wrong and don’t or, if not possible, try not to do it again. Also remember to think of new ways if you tried something over and over again and it did not work.

So my time was actually pretty enjoyable (except for that part we don’t talk about), I learned A LOT of things as I said and my team got through the challenges pretty good, but there were parts it was still very challenging. Maybe you can go there and try to come up with better strategies.                                        (some pictures are not my group)

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First Few Weeks of 5th Grade

Jennie # # # #

Ever since the moment I first stepped into the classroom, I realized fifth grade was amazing, not as scary and as stressful as I thought. We got to do many nice (and challenging) things like the Four Fours Challenge and the True or False game about Mrs. Cooper (not that the questions are challenging, the smartboard was giving everyone a hard time and it was challenging handling it).

So far, I really liked everything we did but my favorite was the identity chart, the locker sign, and the We Make a Difference portraits and quotes because the portraits required creativity and imagination to how I draw and describe myself, for the identity chart I needed to express my identity myself a lot and and for the locker sign I just chose one thing I love a lot and drew whatever I wanted that I knew I would still for the rest of the year.

I’m REALLY looking forward to the Halloween party because to me it seems like 5th grade privilege because when Zoe, my friend, and I saw it, our eyes popped out of our heads since you probably don’t get a Halloween Party in other grades (maybe kindergarten, I have no idea). Another thing I can’t wait for is the Hot Dog Field Day because I’m wondering if I will get to taste a hot dog for the first time and I normally still like field days, so basically, I’m really looking forward to these things.

So, 5th grade is very enjoyable in my opinion, and I do hope I will continue to enjoy the rest of 5th grade throughout the school year and on and on and on.

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