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This week in English I had to write a blog post about what I want/think my future will be.

In the future I would like to have a good job. I’m still not sure of what kind of job I want to get but I do want one that pays a decent salary and I want to be in one that is famous world wide. One of my dreams is that I will be lucky at a lotto draw and win 10 million dollars (Riyals). Though I know if I do win I will be very, very lucky. I feel my parents would like me to be one of the smartest pupils in my class.

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This is my final assessment of the six trait rule. I chose to write about the Enzo ferrari so I hope you like it!

With only speed on your mind you feel you have to push the pedal to the metal and that’s all it takes for this splendid car to move as fast as a missile! When you look at a Ferrari the first thing you think of is speed,but do you know what it takes to make it? This energetic super vehicle called Enzo Ferrari also known as Ferrari Enzo was manufactured by a company called Ferrari. A car this great approximately two months to build. This car is created with formula one technology such as a super strong carbon-fibre body. There are four key features this car has to have and go through before it can be bought by a rich costumer. First the engine and the sleek body has to be created. These are the two things the car has to have. An interesting fact is that robots do half the work. This is not because the workers are too lazy to do it. It’s because these mechanical robots work are activities that cannot be done by humans. For example the robots put specific items in the freezing liquids that are over -20 degrees. Next the body will be painted and soon after it will join the motor. At this time the leather seats are being carefully crafted. Remember in the making there will be several checks and the car might have to go back to have the same procedure repeated. Finally, after everything is put in place the car has to go through its fourth aspect. How well does it actually drive? If it fails, changes will be made but if it succeeds it will finally be put up for sale.

The lion is the king of the jungle because its agile, its large, it’s tough and it’s got a dominant roar. These features make the Ferrari the king of cars. This fabulous vehicle has a very powerful V12 or 6.0 liter engine. What made this car so quick was 1. the engine and 2. how much it weighs (1.36 tones). For a car like this, to show its true potential though it needs to be light and small but should have tyres that don’t wear out easily or quickly, it has a wheelbase is 104 inches. In length it is 185.1 inches; It 45.2 inches in height. Now you would think that this is quite a lot, and it is, but if you compare it to other types of medium sized vehicles such as a Toyota Camry or a Honda Civic you could say its pretty light. There are two diverse versions of this car. The first one was called F40 and the second one was called F50. Its remarkable designers name was Pininifarina.

What makes this car so special is its record, how much it costs, and how many trophies its earned. This car has it all. In 2004. Sports Car International named the Enzo Ferrari number three on their list of top sports cars of the 2000′s. Motor Trend Classic named the Enzo as number four in their list of the ten “Greatest Ferrari’s of all time”. At the end of the day this car could reach a top speed of 355.6 km/h(221 mph) and this why it is one of the most powerful cars in the world. Now unfortunately only 400 Ferrari were made and they were made between the years 2002-2004, which means you would be pretty special if you owned this car. This is also one of the reasons why this car is very expensive.The first 399 of them were US $643,330 and the last one was US$1,274,229. Now a day if a Enzo Ferrari is put up for auction it would probably be over $1,000,000.

We have now started reading a new book called the giver. Basicly its about a boy who lives in a perfect community. We had to write a blog post saying what are the positive and negative things in jonases community.

The negative things are that you can be released from  the community by  just making a few mistakes. You have to get a job when you are 12 and the community is very strict. Also the other negative thing is that you cant give a baby a name until they are one years old. The positive thing is that everybody will get a job as long as they don’t get released before and all children get bikes when they are nine years old.

We have only read three chapters so far and I feel its a pretty good book all round.

Image by unfinishedperson

On April 19, 2010 i took a survey which was posted on our edublogs site. We had to answer the survey by saying yes or no or true or false. Then you would have to write an explanation for your answer.Once we had completed the survey we had to pick one of the statements and write a blog post about it. I chose the statement ‘ Overpopulation is such a problem that families should not be allowed to have more then two children”. I chose to say its true.

Overpopulation has now become a big thing. The world is getting overpopulated every minute. Though people are dieing, more are being born. It is difficult to chose yes or no. The worlds population will continually grow but sometimes you may have a child by accident and that child will be taken from you and maybe even killed. The rule has already applied in China. People cannot have more then two children because China is two densely populated. There is nearly a 100% chance that the worlds population will increase, but  how long will it take before the world has to many people on it? There may already be to many.

Image by world resources

We have now moved on from ideas and organization to word choice and voice. When we first started the trait voice,  we had to write for 15 minutes about what makes us unique. It was quite difficult for me because I hadn’t done anything like this before. Once we had finished writing for 15 minutes we had to highlight words in our paragraphs that we think that describes us. e.g I like to be clean. I highlighted the word clean, I highlighted it because being clean is one of the things that makes me unique. We then had to define the word voice. Each one of us had to write what we think voice means. Once we had all completed it we put them together. This is what we got.

Voice makes you unique, everyone has one but not everyone can express it. It is what you want it to be, you can change it. It is what you need when you are stuck! It helps you live your life.

We finally started to use different voices. e.g scary, children’s…

Then we started word choice. In word choice we had to make add adjectives and use words that are more specific. Once we had finished editing we moved on to synonyms. Synonyms are words that mean the same or nearly the same meaning as another word. We then had to know what a verb, a noun, an adjective and what a adverb means. These are my results.

verbs-action words e.g hop, jump, sprint.

nouns-people, places or things. The more advanced meaning is “ideas or state of being”.

adjectives-words that describe a noun.

adverbs-words that describe verbs. it usually ends in Ly.

We also learned that the same verb can be used in the same part of speech and that it takes time to find the right word.

Image by This years love

We are now on the second thing that is on the rubric list. This is organization. The last one was ideas. Click the button ideas to see my last rubric. Ideas

We first took our three main ideas and put them on a fact chart. My three ideas were  speed, grip and engine of the car. Later I changed two of my main ideas to how the car is made and how much it costs. Then we added supporting facts for are topic, at the same time we tried to research some info on what we wanted to know about the car. For example I wanted to know how loud the engine is when the car is traveling at max speed. Then with the information we had we wrote our first draft.

Later on we were look at a sheet of paper and highlighting the transitions it had in the paragraphs. In this paper there were already a couple of transitions to help us out but the teacher went and emailed us a couple more harder ones. After that we had to put around five transitions into each of our paragraphs and then highlight them.

So far I feel that the work isn’t to challenging but my opinion could change as we go on. The next thing on our student rubric is voice.

A long time ago in France the French revolution was about to begin. At this time their were three estates. The first estate which were the clergy was second to the king. The second estate were the nobles. These men were the knights of their time. They would defend the king at all costs. The last and poorest estate were the third estate.

The clergy and the nobles had life pretty easy compared to the the third estate. Unlike the first and second estate there were different kind of ranks in the third estate. For example the urban workers and the landless labourers would get very little compared to the middle class third estate. In population 90% of the citizens were made up of the the peasants, urban workers and landless labourers.Even though they reign in population they only own 25% of the land. This is one of  things that lead up to the French revolution.

Once the revolution started many people were murdered  because of  king Louis XVI bad choices. The nobles and the clergy tried their best to stop them but they managed to get past them without much problem and tried to kill everyone of them. King Louis and his wife, the queen of  France tried to get away but in the end it was futile as the king and queen were caught and had their heads chopped of  by the guillotine.

A picture of a guillotine

By by Augapfel

In English we were preparing for writing a magazine article. My article was about a car, and that specific car was a Ferrari. In making the article we followed the 6-point rubric. We started of with ideas.

We first had to get a topic sentence and so it wouldn’t boring we weren’t allowed to use our topic as a word. e.g. If your topic was drama you couldn’t use that word in the sentence.  To do that we had to come up with five ideas that would try to show what the main idea was but without saying it. Then we had to square it down to three. Mine was…

• The incredible acceleration
• The amazing grip it had on the road
• The care it took to build it

After that we had to make our topic sentence.Not long after we had to write our starting our first draft paragraph.

The second  point on the rubric which is organization will discuss what we did after that.

This is my end of term assessment. The assessment was to answer a couple of questions on a sheet of paper. Though it sounds easy, it isn’t. To answer the questions you would first need to read the novel “Esperanza Rising” and here is some information on the novel.

 A girl named Esperanza (hence the name “Esperanza Rising) lived in a beautiful house with lots of fancy clothes. But a catastrophe struck when Esperanza lost her dad, her house and all her money. Then it was her mum’s choice to choose whether she would marry the cruel Tio Luis (Esperanza’s dad’s brother) or flee to California and she decided to go to California.

There is more info but those were the basics, and now it’s time to show you my work. Enjoy!

 Develop and adapt active reading skills and strategies

I can make many connections from the book “Espearnza” to my own personal life. For instance one day in class we were acting like Esperanza, doing all sorts of jobs like washing, sweeping and cooking. It can be  lot of fun at first, but after doing it hundreds and hundreds of times you would get really bored and your hands would ache badly. I think this is a big connection. There is a video about what we did on YouTube.

Making connections with other children helps me get new ideas about the topic we are discussing.

I could start to see more clearly the resemblance between me and Esperanza. The resemblance was, that I too would find it hard to do everything Esperanza was doing at the time. You never realize how hard people who live in poverty work until you try it out for yourself.

This time I chose the reading strategy  Making Connections. Next time I would like to try the reading strategy called Visualize. I would like to try the strategy visualize because I would like to picture the story in my head.

 Understand and respond to ideas, viewpoints, themes and purposes in texts

I think that in Esperanza Rising “class” is a main theme. There are many definitions of the word class. The one I’m interested is the one that is related to the word rank.

I think the word class means different levels of importance. If you are at the top (like Esperanza) you would live a life, where people who are lower than you in class would assist you whenever you needed help and do most of the housework. If you are in the middle level (like most of us in the school are) you would live a happy and joyful life doing everything in fair share. If you are in the bottom end of the level your life probably wouldn’t be as easy going as the other levels. You would most likely not have much money, and money is usually essential for daily life. You would have to travel quite a long way just to get water and since you wouldn’t have much money you would not be able to afford public transport. This means you would have to walk in the excruciating heat of the sun.

Since Esperanza was quite wealthy at the start of the book and then started to become poorer Esperanza’s class changed a lot. At the start of the book she took her life for granted, but once she lost most of her money she finally realized that her past life as a rich girl was something that her friend named Isabel, could only dream of.

In the end Esperanza finally realized that even if you are rich and living a great life someone who is poor can be just as happy as you.

Relate texts to the social, historical and cultural contexts in which they were written

• Hundreds of people lost all their money
• No one has figured out the right reason of how it started
• In total fourteen billion dollars was lost
• Tuesday, October 29, 1929 is also referred to as “Black Tuesday”

The great depression is linked to the book, Esperanza rising. The thing that makes them similar is that during the great depression many people lost every single penny they had and Esperanza’s family lost a lot of money when their house caught fire. Though the reasons behind each one, was different. For the great depression it could have been the stock market crash in 1929, though no one is absolutely sure  and in Esperanza’s case it was someone who wanted to lend money to Romano (Esperanza’s mother) to marry her, and the man responsible for it (Tio Luis) knew he had to make sure she didn’t have any money left, and the only way to do that, was to burn down her house.

Analyze how writers’ use of linguistic and literary features shapes and influences meaning

Simile- Her arms outstretched like a bird ready for flight. I think that this simile means that if you stretch your arms out wide you would be like a bird getting ready for takeoff.  

Personification- The house moaned and whistled. I think this personification means that there were a lot of bizarre noises in the house and a strong force of wind was bashing on the windows of the house.

Metaphor- Sank into a dark hole of despair and disbelief. I think this metaphor means that the person involved just cannot believe what has happened and thinks that he/she will be miserable for the rest of her life.
                                                                                                                               

I think that similes, metaphors and personifications make the book far more interesting and help’s the book to show things more precisely.

Today in class we were talking about powerful people, we each got one famous and powerful person to write some description about. My powerful person is Oliver Cromwell.

Oliver Cromwell was born in 1599 and died in 1658. He was born into a family of Huntingdonshire. He was educated in Huntingdon, Cambridge and Lincoln’s inn.

When the civil wars broke out in 1642, when Oliver was 43 years old, he made it clear that he had a few talents and abilities. Though he lacked in military experience, he created and led a superb army of calvary and moved up a couple of ranks, from captain to lieutenant-general in three years. Before 1645 he was one of the parliamentarians. Then he became lord general and commander in chief and lord lieutenant of Ireland. In the making he got married to Elizabeth and had 9 kids.

 Picture by ell brown