Wisdom Tale and Comic

 

 

For the past few months my classmates and I have been reading wisdom tales. We have even made comics about them. What are wisdom tales you might ask? Wisdom tales are a type of story from ancient times that are from around the world. They use characters to describe a human trait.  All wisdom tales have a moral. Actually, many books do too, but wisdom tales really focus on that. 

Fire, Water, Truth, And Falsehood is a tale with four characters. I bet you know who. You guessed it, Fire, Water, Truth, and Falsehood. The story starts when the characters find a very big group of cattle for them to eat. Truth thinks everyone should split them equally but Falsehood doesn’t agree, but keeps that to himself for now. So, Fire and Water agree with Truth but Falsehood thought up a little scheme to get all the cattle. He goes to Water and says to kill Fire so Water would have more cattle. Sadly, Fire gets murdered by Water. Then Falsehood goes to Truth and says, “You saw what Water did to our friend. We have to run.” They ran to a nearby mountain to which Water could not follow. Then Falsehood said, “Truth you shall now be my servant because I am more powerful than you.” But Truth stood up to Falsehood and then they fought for ages and ages. Finally they brought it to Wind for him to decide. Wind didn’t know either so he blew across the whole world to ask people. The answer is that they were both strong. Some said False can destroy Truth with a single word. Others said that if Truth is there even like a small candle in the dark he can change all. The moral is that we should always speak up and look for what’s right. Sometimes the Falsehood gets in the way, but not when the Truth is active.

There are so many wisdom tales that I could have chosen from, but I chose Fire, Water, Truth, And Falsehood. Why did I choose it? Well me personally I thought that it was one of the more interesting of the books. I also thought it would be really fun to draw all the characters. My personal favorite of the four definitely had to be Fire so I was kind of bummed out when he died in the third scene. But then again they were all cool to me.



How did I make my comic you might ask? First I started by making every character on sketchbook. I used the layers to move them around every scene I had to make. I was new to the app so I definitely needed some help with some things, but if you aren’t great at drawing on paper I highly recommend sketchbook. It’s pretty easy to figure out and has lots of cool features. For the comic theme of the story I used comic life 3 which gave me speech bubbles and lots of cool different types of pages. So those are two great apps if you want to make a comic.

Planking

 

What is a habit? A habit is something you do consistently. I have lots of habits. Actually, we all have habits like brushing our teeth every morning and night, or something like going to the gym and working out for 1 hour a day.  The compound effect is when we just added small amounts that built up over time. That’s what I’m going to be talking about today – My journey planking.

As you can see in my habit tracker, I colored in the days of the month from October 24th until December 14th. December 14th was the day of “The Challenge.” The Challenge is something that this Language Arts class does every year, so basically those days I colored are the days I planked. When we started our planking in October it was only 30 seconds. Every week we added 15 seconds so after 7 weeks we were planking for two minutes and 15 seconds. In the final challenge, we competed against each to see who could plank for the longest. I got second place with an 11 minute plank. At the time of this blog writing my arms are still a little sore.

When we first started doing the planking it was a little hard to remember because I just wasn’t used to planking every day. My friends and I helped to remind each other to plank and sometimes we did it together during advisory time. The more time that passed, the easier it was to remember to plank because it just became something I did every day. Over the whole challenge I noticed that it was easier to do it every day, not only because it was becoming a habit but also because I got stronger so it wasn’t hard.  

For my new habit I decided to to stick with an exercising habit and go with 10 pushups a day. When I can easily do 10 pushups, I’ll add 5 more. I hope I’ll be adding one or two times each week until I finally reach 100 pushups a day. Once I get to numbers over 50, I’ll include that it will be okay to do the pushups more than once a day to fit them all in if I need to. I’m pretty excited about trying to create this new habit. For one, I know that if I can do this, then I can also practice creating other good habits, and also, I really like the idea of getting stronger doing pushups.

My Opinion About Books

Books give you knowledge. I have almost 2,000 books in my house. Crazy, right? Well not when your family is made up of seven people. Have I read all of them? That’s a different question. I think I’ve read less than half of them, which is still pretty good, and I loved all of them. How many books do you think you have in your house, more or less than a thousand?

This is just one of my six bookshelves.

My favorite books have to be either the Wings of Fire series or Percy Jackson. I also like some comic books like Big Nate. Sorry Harry Potter fans. I have yet to read the books. My favorite genres are humor, fantasy, and adventure books, which you can see my favorite books consist of if you’ve read them. 

My favorite author is probably Tui. T Sutherland because I thought Wings of Fire was just such a cool series. When I’m reading books from the series I can picture everything so clearly; it’s like I’m in the book itself. I also like it because it’s adventurous and funny. I love humorous books, and I haven’t read too many books that make me laugh. Wings of Fire was one that did. Third, it was so interesting. There was always a cliffhanger, one after another. I remember a few times when my mom called me for dinner and I’d say, “One more minute,” because I could not stop.

Where do you like to read? I have a hammock in my room so I stuff a pillow in it, grab a blanket and read away. It’s really great just to escape from reality if I find a really great book. Sometimes I can just sit and read forever. I find it harder to read when there’s a lot of noise, like people talking  because I listen to that instead of focusing on the book. I normally find which books I want to read from friends, family or just authors that I know I like.

I read because it helps me in school and teaches me great things. Sometimes my parents don’t even know what I’m talking about. I think we all know we get the best feeling when we are right and our parents are wrong. It also teaches me a lot of new words that I’ve never even seen or heard. I have a much bigger vocabulary than I used to. Why do you read, if you do?



 



Window or Mirror ~ Percy Jackson

Image from unsplash

This summer I read Percy Jackson by Rick Riordan. This book is fantasy and adventure. I’m going to be talking about this book and the windows and mirrors in it. A mirror is something that’s the same like Percy is 11 and I’m 11 that’s a mirror. A window would be something like being a demigod and me being a normal kid. So Percy is a young boy that is around my age 11. He wasn’t the best student so he got expelled five times… but after the fifth he went to a new school for demigods which I clearly am not. I’m going to leave it there because I don’t want to spoil the whole story if you decide to read it. But it’s a good series book that I really like, so if you like books like this check it out.

 

Lacrosse

 I love lacrosse and if you don’t know what it is; it’s a game where you have a stick that looks like this:

So, if you look at my first picture, you can see that it has a pole in the middle which is called the shaft. And then a top which is called the head, and the string is called the mesh. That’s a normal  lacrosse stick. Now picture a regular lacrosse stick with a shaft that is about double the length of a regular stick. It’s called a long stick and it’s used for defense. Some people might call it a defensive pole.Now a goalie stick. The head is bigger than a normal stick and wider to catch shots coming at the goal. Now let’s get to the actual game. In lacrosse you have three positions, well no, four. 3 midfield, 3 defense, 3 attack, and the goalie. So, every game you start with 10 players on the field. Plus the other team’s 10 so 20 people on at once. The goal of the game is to get the ball past the other team’s goalie into the goal.

Basic fundamentals: let’s just start with passing. To pass you want to hold your dominant hand near the middle of the stick. Then your  non-dominant hand at the bottom. Then, like a lever, propel the stick forward. Next, let’s get to catching. To catch you want to put your dominant hand at the top of the stick and non dominant hand at the bottom and then catch it. Following that we have cradling. It’s a little hard  to explain, but for a video and more information you can look up Paul Rabil YouTube and he can show you how to do all those things better.

 

Camp Kirkwood

 

Last week on a Wednesday morning the DA sixth grade was going to Camp Kirkwood in the middle of hurricane Idalia! We started the morning by playing a game of Lovett says kind of like Simon but “Lovett” way better. So then we got onto the buses which in my opinion was great. You basically just got to talk to your friends for 2 hours so when we got there it was pouring down rain so we took a bag and ran for the pavilion. Then me and my cabin mates went to our cabins, unpacked, made our beds, and then went to lunch. 

After lunch we did some activities and they were fun. My favorite was definitely either the v swing or zip line over the lake because they were so exhilarating. After the first day of activities we had 1 hour of free time which was when i went to my cabin showered and then went to get some spaghetti for dinner. After the delicious Italian noodles. The camp counselors then told us there was going be a movie or we could play dodge ball. I went to dodge ball and after we got drum roll please SNOW CONES! And that night I think at least half the people who were playing dodge ball got DRENCHED when I went to get the snow cones but it was worth it.

The next day…

Yup new day so we got ready and went to breakfast. For breakfast we had cereal. After we got breakfast we did some activities. I went to the pool which was really fun. I played Moss.  After the pool we had lunch. After lunch I played soccer and my team and the others tied sadly. Then we had an hour of free time. I stayed in my cabin with my friends then I went to the v swing which was definitely one of my favorites, and then we had dinner which I think we had Mac n cheese and chicken which was great. We then went to the benches to sit with our advisory and talk. That night we also had marshmallows then we all went to bed.

The next day …

After we woke up I shadowboxed my friend Kareem for a few minutes but sadly we had to stop and pack. Very sad I know but our cabin teacher Mr. Lantzy said if we go fast enough we get to play basketball so we zoomed. After we played basketball we had breakfast WHICH WAS WAFFLES! They were great. So counselors then told us to go to the flagpole. After breakfast for our last activity, I did my first canoeing then zip line, probably my favorite, my last activity of camp… yup then we had lunch and left. When we got back to school I was pretty excited to go home and see my family and when my mom picked me up or my mom and my sister. Who lives in Richmond came to pick me up. I was so happy I hadn’t seen my sister for a while so it was really great to see her.