Beowulf

I have heard some things about Beowulf from last years juniors. They all said it was crap. And I can understand that because I have read some and it was very hard to get interested in the story. I don't really know what is going on yet because I have only read two pages, but hopefully it gets better. I really do not think it will.
Hopefully it is possible to write an interesting poem. I really don't think that it is. So that already makes this book seem bad to me without even reading some of it. But the back says that it has dragons and monsters and a hero, and that sounds like it might be okay if it were written today, not 1000 years ago, or however long ago it was written. I think it is going to be worse than colonial literature, but I hope it is better.

The Vocab Quiz on Section 1

Last year, we had some quizzes that I thought were a little bit weird. For two quizzes we had to draw pictures that defined the word. That was strange and somewhat difficult because I can't draw very well and it was hard to show what I wanted to clearly. The next weird quiz we had was that we had to write a story using the words in the section. This was a good idea for a quiz, but it took to long to incorporate all of the words in the story.
But, the first vocab quiz this year was very good. It was good because it was easy. Also, the quiz was straightforward. We had to define five words and use five others in a sentence. A good quiz that is easy to grade, easy to take, and also makes the taker study the words a little.

Book Editing

This project was somewhat difficult to start. We had to edit the book and show what we thought the book meant to us in a creative way. That sounds easy but once I tried to start, it wound up being really hard. I thought that I was somewhat creative, but I found that all I could come up with was painting pages in the book. And that idea came from Ms. Duke. I eventually got some ideas with the help of some of my group members but it took about thirty minutes to come up with ideas.
I ended up editing Murder at the Vicarage. With the help of Cameron, I decided to take the schedule in the book founds towards the end and glue the different parts of the schedule throughout the book. Then I would paint the pages I glued things in for no reason, I just felt like it. Im also going to make a window out of the last few pages but I haven't decided what to put in, probably a picture of a bullet.

Summer Reading

For this summer reading, I read Murder at the Vicarage, The Eyre Affair, and The Metamorphasis. All of these books were decent. My favorite was Murder at the Vicarage. I liked how it was a mystery, but I did not like how all of the characters speculated for 200 pages. It was the same thing over and over. They would specualte, then someone would fin something interesting, and they would specualte with that new interesting item involved in the speculation. I also think it is weird how an old lady can solve the murder mystery but the detectives who do that for a living can't, that seems strange to me. Other than that, it was a decent book.
I also think that I had a good strategy for reading. I read all of my books in the last three days before school. I thought that we would be tested for detail. I was able to do a good job on all of those maps because I read the books almost the day before I was tested on them. I did not even need notes.

Straw Warmup

This was an unusual warmup. Last year we did not have to many warmups that were not written on paper. I still don't understand how that warmup related to the class that day but I don't care, it was better than other warmups. Maybe it was just trying to get our groups to work together. But if that was the point, then why couldn't we talk while we were assembling the structure.
I think that our group really did win the straw contest. According to miriamwebster.com the defenition of free - standing is " adjective1 : standing alone or on its own foundation." Our straw structure was technically standing on its own, but with the help of the light. Even though the intstructions did not say that we couldnt't use tape, we took the tape off and it still was connected. I think that we should have been champions.

Vocab Section 1

This vocab book looks a whole lot different then last years. Last year, the vocab was pretty easy. This year, the first section is harder than some of the sections towards the end of last year's book. Maybe that's just because we are older now, I don't know. But, I do know that those vocab squares were very time consuming. I really don't understand why we need to know that much about the vocab word. I know the SATs are coming up but do I really need to know the etymology of a word? How is knowing that convene came from latin going to help me? And furthermore, I don't think I need a symbol to remeber a word. I just remember things.
I wonder how the tests are going to be set up. I hope they are going to be normal vocab quizzes where there is matching and writing sentences. I don't want to write a story using all of the vocab words. That would take too much time. Also, I would rather fill in blanks than have to draw pictures illustrating the wordsl.