In my Language Arts class we read a book called The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera. After that, we got inspired to write our own ideal world books about what we think is the perfect world. An artist named Peg Gignoux helped us create our books.
For the past four months, my Language Arts class read, summarized, and carefully created comics based on one wisdom tale from the wisdom tales book by Heather Forest. Wisdom tales are short parables, each one teaching a strong life lesson. All of them have different settings and characters based on their origin. While we were working on our comic, one of my classmates had her dad Brittain Peck, who is a professional artist, speak to us on ways to change our comic drawings and ways to put a message out through our drawings.
I created a comic about a parable called a Dispute in Sign Language. This story is from Japan. A Dispute in Sign Language is about how two monks talk in sign language but they both interpret the conversation differently. It starts with a young monk who decides he wants to study with an old wise master. The master tells him to go talk to his other one eyed student who is in the garden to aid him in his decision. He decides to converse with the student in sign language to show off his intelligence. They both interpret the conversation very differently, and the young monk decides he is not smart enough to stay there. He thought the one eyed student was talking about all of these different things that he couldn’t comprehend, but the one eyed student thought the young monk was saying mean and offensive things to him. The moral of this story is that people interpret things differently, and assume best intentions.
I chose this wisdom tale because it teaches us to consider what somebody else might be thinking or feeling, and that other people might have a different opinion than you. I think this is a moral that anyone could follow, and it can make people kinder, and more considerate. For my images in comics, I used an online drawing app called Sketchbook. Sketchbook is a great online app with a wide variety of tools and brushes to draw with. It is super simple, and makes drawing a lot of fun! Then, I used another online app called comic life 3 to put all of the drawings together and to add the writing. In comic life, they have many options for backgrounds, and comic pages that already have all of the boxes and all you need to do is insert drawings and words! Once my comic was finished online, I printed it out in color, and my comic was done! Overall, this was a super fun and engaging project, and I encourage anybody who is interested in this to try it!
Today my Language Arts class did the plank challenge. Every day, for a few weeks, we planked. We started planking for only 15 seconds, but as the weeks went by, we added 15 seconds to our timer. At the end of the seven weeks, we were planking daily for 2 minutes and 15 seconds! Then, we had the plank challenge. I stopped after 4 minutes and 15 seconds, but a kid in my class won the challenge after close to 11 minutes! As I did this challenge, I noticed my ability to stick with my daily habit was not very strong. When I was planking at home, I was getting discouraged and sometimes didn’t plank at all. This definitely affected my performance when we did the plank challenge, and it made it so I didn’t have the daily habit of planking. This shows that even if you just skip a few days and skip doing your daily habit, it can ruin all of your hard work of building your daily habit. Daily habits are so helpful, and they can really help you improve yourself by just doing something small every day.
I decided to make my own daily habit for myself. Every day, I am going to start exercising. For me, this would usually be like a short run through my neighborhood. If I can stick to my daily habit for about a month, soon it will turn into a real habit and I can just do it without even thinking about it. I also have other daily habits that I have done for years, so I just do it without thinking about it. Some of my small daily habits are washing my face every night and morning, and brushing my teeth every night and morning. These can help me improve because they keep my body clean and healthy. These compound effects are very powerful because each time you do it, you get a little bit better. Making or breaking a daily habit is very hard. If you have a bad daily habit, you just do it without thinking, which makes it very hard to break. It takes a helping hand like a family member or a friend to remind you not to do it and then, slowly, you can grow away from it. It is also just as hard to start a daily habit. You also need a helping hand to remind you to do your daily habit.
As James Clear said. “All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger. Roots entrench themselves and branches grow. The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.”
Sea of strangers
Prim hospital tight moment sirens torn fly incoming tide
metal
indiscriminately shoving shrinks consternation opportunity
Prim, Prim!
Image from Unsplash
I just finished Race to the Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse. This is a book about a girl who goes on a journey to visit her ancestors the Navajo people to save her family and Earth from the monsters that are coming to destroy everything. I think this book is a window book for me. A window book is a book that shows someone else that has a different life than you and you can use the book as a “window” to look at their life. I like window books better than mirror books because window books are usually fantasy and they are things that couldn’t happen in real life. Mirror books are books that you could relate to like if you are like the main character in some way. I think that window books are better because I think it is more fun to read about different worlds and dimensions than to read a book about your life that you could relate to.
This summer I went to Japan. It was two weeks of a super fun and a different experience! When we got there, my cousins and aunt and uncle were waiting for us at the airport. We checked into our hotel and explored Tokyo and Kyoto for 8 days. In Tokyo, we went to so many different restaurants and sights like a ramen museum. We also took a long walk up a street full of shops that led up to a temple. It was very hot and very tiring but the view from the temple was worth it! After that, we took a plane flight to Okinawa, where we spent 5 days. The hotel was on a gorgeous beach with fish and shells and coral and starfish. I spent most of my days in Okinawa on the beach and in the pool, collecting shells and swimming. We also went to a lot of different restaurants in Okinawa. One of my favorites was a Japanese restaurant where you cooked your own beef and soup. Overall, Japan was so much fun and so memorable. I hope to go back there soon!
We left for Camp Kirkwood on August 30th, 2023. I sat on the bus next to one of my friends. When we got there it was raining because we were in the middle of a hurricane. We went to our cabins and unpacked and chose our bunk beds. After that, we went to have lunch in the dining hall. The food was different and not what I was used to. That day for lunch we had ham and cheese on a hamburger bun and chips. The chips were good. After lunch, we did a few activities because the rain became a light drizzle. My group did a low ropes course, and then we went to the pool when the rain basically stopped. In the night, we watched a movie because we couldn’t go on our night hike because of the rain. It rained the whole first night and was still raining in the morning.
The next day, I did team building, which was also called the low ropes course. It is a rope tied to a lot of trees, and everyone must stay together as a group and follow the rope blind folded. Forest ecology was another educational activity where you learn about trees and plants. Orienteering was learning how to use a compass. After that, we went to the pool again after lunch. That night, we had s’mores around the campfire and it rained all night again. On our last day, my group did the zip line, canoeing, and a really high swing called the v swing. It would drop you and you would swing in a wide v. The bus ride back was fun and I was excited to get home and sleep in my own bed, but camp was still fun.