This week we learned about signing statements and learning from texts in ways other than reading. Texts other than reading, such as video clips or movies, can be really helpful. A lot of the time if I'm trying to do something and I don't know how I can look it up on YouTube and find a tutorial or a walk through. We watched The Twilight Zone The Obsolete Man. There were a lot of cool quotes in this film, like when the librarian said "No human is obsolete." That was pretty cool because I think that he is right. Everyone has a purpose. Another thing I got from this film was in the end the government people were acting like zombies. I thought that this kind of signified that our government can kind of act like zombies an

This week we mainly focused on working with our groups and working on reading The Alchemist. So far I really like the book. I also like working in groups. The groups are cool because it really gives me a chance to work on my leadership and teamwork skills. I'm the group leader, so It's kind of my job to make sure everyone does their reading and I have to keep all of us organized. It's kind of a hard job but I don't mind it. 

For our presentations we have to take pictures of the reading that relates with our big question. This made it really easy to share all of my ideas and information with my group. That is now something that I can do in college to help me take notes and things.

This week we worked on finding our big questions and picking the book we wanted to read. My groups big question was "How do you gain courage?" and we chose to read The Alchemist. We learned how to take pictures of the books and upload them to google drive. This was kind of helpful because now my whole group can take notes  and keep them all in the same place. I think that will be helpful when we get to the end of the book and working on the final project. It will also be cool to see everyone else's opinions. So far I like the Alchemist and I think my group does too. We have had some pretty good conversations about it. 

In this past week we learned about the power of story and mentor texts. The power of story is like when Mr. Schoenborn told the story about when his father was in the waiting room while he was being born. I remember the story because it was sort of funny and it got me to think about how that would be. That is the power of story. Stories can help you remember things, or connect better to things. Mentor texts are texts that you can look at, like Mahraan's and Hayleigh's I believe stories, in order to think about ideas of what you would like your text to be like. You can look at the examples and find the things you liked and include those in your story, and find the things you didn't like and avoid those in your story. This week we did a lot of group discussion and we also broke into small groups and discussed there. That helped me because I could share ideas with a few people before I shared them with the entire class. On a scale of 1-10 I would say that I understand the topics we learned this week at an 8. I could still work on making my story more powerful though. My writing isn't very emotionally charged.