Collaborate Constructively

The last time I did lit. circles, I had to do them with a partner, otherwise known as Pasha. I thought that the benefits of working with a partner is that you can see what their thinking for lit. circles before they actually present. It's like a sneak preview of what they are writing down. Plus, with partners you only have to do half of all the work so it's less stressing to me and my partner. The downside of this all is that sometimes your partner doesn't do anything at all! By the time it's time to present, you only turn in half of the work. I almost thought that Pasha was slacking off and not doing his job because his half of the lit circle was empty. The next day I found out that he was using Microsoft word (because our lit circles were done on Google docs) to type it up and then copying and pasting it onto our document. I was relieved, but the next time we do this, I just hope that we have a better connection. I thought that understood the novel better when we did partner lit circles because I could listen to my partners opinion of the question or passage and compare with my own. If the my partner's questions was different to mine, it would make me re think my entire answer. One question was ' Would Jacob find his dad in the end?' A first I thought no because things like that happen in story's like this, and then Jake would have to live with Supeet. But other people said yes which made me actually compare my answer to theirs.

Literature Circles Reflections

Ah, Lit Circles. This is a project where we read a book and then write, come up with questions about the book and so on and right now i'm doing one about the book Thunder Cave by Roland Smith. I thought doing the Lit Circles helped me understand the book more because of the fact that along with finding passages and questions we also have to find vocabulary. This helped a lot because usually when I read a book with new vocabulary, I would have been to lazy to find out what that meant and I wouldn't understand it much. For example, "I've never seen anyone scarper so fast." now you probably won't know what scarper is right? Now if that sentence was in a book then you probably won't understand the whole page or chapter if it isn't explained (scarper is a synonym for run) which is why I thought that doing the vocabulary was important, not only does it help us comprehend the book more, it also helps me learn more vocabulary that I can use in everyday life (in fact, the vocabulary is the easiest part of the project, hehe..) Some key ideas my group and I talked about usually involved the main character in pain or in trouble. Events in the story include the main character's mom dying and him getting beat up and he coming face to face with a lion. I thought these ideas were important because in shows us how the main character is always in a bad situation. This means that the plot of the book will have something to do with the main character having many conflicts in search for his dad.

I didn't really make any connections throughout the story but I did manage to make one or two reactions about what I thought about the book. My reactions are mostly on how the author writes the book. For example, 'I thought the author made the book interesting by leaving clues to the next chapter. One of them was on the way Roland made everything sound like it was going to be okay when all of a sudden making something bad happen. I chose to write and talk about this because when I was reading, I started to get bored and predicted 'oh everything is going to work out, how boring' but when I read the part when something bad happened, I then thought 'oh my gosh, I didn't expect that! I wonder how he'll get past this obstacle.' That part just gave me interest to read on like once in the book, the main character was about to book a plane ticket to Kenya. I thought, since he withdrew ALL the money from his bank account ($1,800), he could have afforded the ticket. But when his travel agent said it would cost $1,964 I had interest to read on and see how he could have afforded the ticket. He also needed extra money to buy food (because they didn't allow food in Kenya) and rent a hotel room.       

My predictions for rest of the book, like I stated above, is the man character facing page after page of conflicts to find his dad. I thought that this would have been an appropriate prediction because from the previous chapters, I noticed that most of the time the main character faces many problems. One example is a problem where he has to get away from thugs at a bazaar in the maze of people, and another one is where he meets a hungry lion. But in any situation, the main character, Jake (yes, I know I should have used the name sooner) always manages to win. When he was chased, Jake managed to loose the thugs and when the lion met him, he threw a bicycle wheel at it and the lion ran away. So that's what I predict for the rest of the book, Jake encounters a problem, Jake finds a way to win, Jake encounters a problem, Jake finds a way to win and so on.        



    

Lines of Symmetry

This is a picture of a chair I took in our dining room. If we ignore the background, this chair has one line of symmetry running directly through the center. Through the wooden bars and down the seat. So if we took a saw and cut the chair directly through the middle, the two parts would be completely identical.