Kawika's PLP (Professional Learning Portfolio) |
Weekly BLog
This week of ELA was a completely normal week. We read chapter 3 of Elie Weisel's "Night", and watched a short "TED Talk" video on Thursday looking for some advice on how to make our upcoming Schoolwide Learning Expectation (SLE) Presentations enjoyable, and somewhat humorous to our audience, being school board members, our teachers, parish members, possibly fellow students and classmates, and especially, our family members. Basically, what these "SLE Presentations" are, are 5-8 minute presentations that we read to these people about a week before graduation, explaining how St. John Eudes School has helped us become College and Career Ready in the 21st Century, and Active Christians In Our Catholic Faith, which are the two said "SLEs". In addition, as a scholarship at graduation, we wrote an in-class essay about how faith can help us have courage, even in the toughest of times. The next in-class essay will be on Tuesday of next week. This time of the school year is always so relaxing; so reassuring, but this process is much harder than I expected it to be, but as I say to myself, the harder the process, the bigger the relief. I wouldn't say that I am nervous about this presentation, but excited. Excited, to talk about the experiences I've had at this school, and share the ideas that have been sitting in my head for quite a while.
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This week of ELA was a quite relaxing week. We had time to make up for missing work, and read Chapter 2 of Elie Wiesel's "Night". In the story, Elie is now 16 years old, and has been taken to one of the Nazi concentration camps, alongside his family. He and his father were separated from his mother and sister, who Elie never saw again. One of the few things that we learned early last week about Elie is that he is very serious about his religion and faith, being one of his inner desires to become a religious scholar, following the footsteps of his "teacher" figure, "Moishe the Beadle", as well as Maimonides, a studier of the Kabbalah. However, he thought to himself, if God cares about the lives of these innocent people, why won't he do anything? Things like these seem to come from God, to challenge our faith, and believe in him in the toughest of times. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer says in his prayer on Christmas Day as a prisoner, "Lord, whatever this day may bring, your name be praised."
This week, we began reading Elie Wiesel's award winning novel, "Night". This story takes place in Eastern Europe, in a country populated by mostly Jews. The narrator, Eliezer, tells us, quite progressively, about his experience before, and during his time at one of the German Concentration camps. Our assignment this week was to read up to page 27, when Elie arrives at his camp. While reading the story, many of us realized that Elie was narrating very progressively, as if he summarizes three years of his life in just a few sentences. Another job of ours this week was to help our teacher keep track of what we've been reading, and what we've been learning; by creating a "reading log". The point of this is to write down any questions we have about the story so far, and/or anything we are unsure about. We also watched a short video about Germany during the 1930s that taught me a few things that I did not know about this war in Eastern Europe, such as the secret pacts that Germany had with the Soviet Union, aka the Red Army, and Italy. Also, a few of my questions are, if Germany had planned this Holocaust and War systematically, how far ahead of time did they need to plan this? And if Moishe the Beadle was a beloved person in the Jewish community Elie lived in, why did no one believe that his stories of the concentration camps were true? These are the type of questions that motivate me to keep reading, and find answers, however; time will tell...
During ELA this week, our homework load was rather light. Not only because we had a field trip on Tuesday, but also because this week is the holiest week of the year, hence the name, "Holy Week". Not many people last week got all of their homework done by Friday, so Monday was basically a day to catch up on any missing work. Tuesday, March 31, was quite the "rude awakening" because of our field trip to the Columbia Space Center, in the city of Downey. Since this is so far away from St. John Eudes school, we needed to arrive at school extra early that day. The Columbia Space Center opens at 10:00 every day, and it is a 2 and a half hour drive with traffic, but little did we know that there was not going to be any this early in the morning. The drive ended up being about 1 hour and 20 minutes, and we arrived at the center an hour and a half early. Nonetheless, it was such a great experience and I learned so much about how hard it is for spacecrafts to be controlled, by the people inside the spacecraft, and for mission control/ground control. It taught us all that collaborative working and teamwork are very important problem solving strategies. On Wednesday, April 1, we took an assessment on the Nominative and Objective case Pronouns. Most people finished early, so we still had the entire class to work on missing assignments or late work. And finally, on Thursday, April 2, or "Holy Thursday", the entire school attended a Mass service in honor of Good Friday and the upcoming Easter Sunday. Friday was a no-school day, and the start of our spring break. It was a very quick week, and very enjoyable as well. I hope you all have a wonderful spring break and a blessed Easter Sunday.
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April 2015
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