Our teacher got us to watch a Ted Talk by a man named Chris Lehman who was Principal at a school where they think that computers and technology is very important.

We had to take notes on his intentions, what he was trying to accomplish and how he explained it all.

We were then asked to put all our notes into a paragraph and post it on our blog.

The audience that his talk was aimed at teachers, educators, parents and maybe older students. Chris shares with everyone in the audience  how he changed his school to make it different from others.

He wants to make students want to learn and wants children to want to go to school. Chris thinks that teachers and students should take time to understand each other and he thinks that teachers should learn from students as well as students learning from teachers.

Chris also made a point about how he thinks technology should just be there when we want to use it. There should be computers in every class so that anyone can use it at any time. If we have the facilities, what’s stopping us from using them?

Another point Chris made was about how when a teacher is asked what they teach, they should say they teach kids. Not a subject. He believed that students should be educated and not trained and I agree with this because some teachers force the work and information into kids but it never sinks in and the kids forget it all. We should be educated, at our own pace, and not trained in a specific order or time. Everyone is different.

A statement that Chris used during his speech was ‘School’s not preparation for real like – it is real life.’ This made me think because I think it’s true. Everyone says that school is training you and preparing you for life but really, school is half of lives. People don’t really change as they get older, most people’s personalities stay the same, so school really is the same as life.

There are stressed people everywhere. They are fired up and ready to roll. There’s sweat dripping down your face; the stage makeup is starting to smudge. Everyone is crammed around the only fan in the room. It’s a simple, old, blue fan that you would imagine would cool down one person, not hundreds. The fan is like the perfect, sugar-coated sweet in a sweet shop. Everyone wants it! It’s jam-packed, like a hundred sardines trapped in a tin. There are costumes flung all over the place. It is thundering. You can hear the audience shuffling around, waiting for the show to begin. Tension. Costumes everywhere. The dark carpet looks like a multi-coloured blanket covering the floor, with red, blue, pink, orange, green, and silver costumes. Some are long, some are short, some are bright, and some have sparkles. Nothing ever goes the way you want it to go on show night. Something will make sure of that whether it’s someone arriving later than expected and panicking, or the stage hasn’t been made to the right size. You just have to let things flow, carry on, and just dance your heart out. Too much organisation will make the performers nervous. Just breathe.

Backstage at a dance show it’s unbelievable and extravagant. Everything is crazy; that is one of the many reasons why I love being in a show. The clutter adds to the feelings you experience. Even a professional show wouldn’t be complete if everything was perfect and nothing went wrong. Everywhere you looked it was chaos. You’re scared and the pressure is starting to get you. Just picture yourself, backstage, you know there are people on the other side of the curtain waiting to watch you perform really soon. You know that if you forget any part of your dance you can’t redo it. Not this time, this time it’s the real thing! There’s no redo button in life. The nerves are kicking in. Your hands are shaking. We’ve been practicing for this day since what seems like forever. The little snowflakes are galloping around, disrupting everyone from what they were trying to do. There are people getting the make-up done and people getting their hair done. On the other hand there were people rehearsing their dances. The audience is waiting. You can’t pause time. This it it. Nobody can tell whether the show will go well but you can just feel it. Immediately you know it’s going to be a great night. Now you’ve finished preparing yourself. It’s time for the real deal.

Dance is one of many ways to let your feelings out without having to say or do anything horrible which is why so many people love it. There aren’t many ways you can let your feelings out easily but this is one of them. Although there are so many different types of dance most people seem to have a favourite. This can vary from ballet, jazz, tap, hip hop, to Spanish flamenco dancing, and because each type of dance is so different you can show people how you really feel. Choose your own music and make up your own dance; do whatever you want. It’s just you in the room. Let all your feelings out with different movements. If you’re happy or excited then choose a loud, active and upbeat piece of music that you love. Turn it on, and, again, just break into dance. Make up your own movements, copy moves you’ve seen before; do anything. It’s something that if you really love it, it could take all of your troubles away and make you feel perfect. Your heart is pumping like the beat of a drum. You just want to dance. That first step on stage, you’ve discovered what you love. You are centre stage; this is your time, nobody else’s. Make it worth it. Nobody can take this moment away from you; it’s just for you to show everyone out there what you can do. So many feelings bolting through your body, it’s hard to keep up with them. If you imagine every feeling as a different colour, right now, you are a rainbow. Your leg is in the air and you feel like you’re in heaven. It’s as if any depressing feelings you had have been lifted up out of you. The next moment you have hit the floor. You missed one of the steps, nobody else can tell but you’ve lost your confidence. You feel like hiding but you just have to continue and make the ending outstanding. You know what you have to do, there’s people watching you. It looks incredible.

Once you are on the stage, it’s time to wow the audience and show them what a real show looks like. The colours over the stage shift from green to red, shadowing the dancers wherever they move like a rainbow following the rain. Glittering snowflakes trail onto the stage; it feels like Christmas. The show has finally begun. It’s quiet, the audience whispers and the music starts. Dancers fly across the stage, darting from one side to the other. Costumes are all colours. It’s like a different world. Elves wander around the stage in search of magic with the angel, nearby, guiding them. The music changes from soft, slow music to upbeat, fast music. Slow and graceful movements transform into quick and sharp movements. From ballet to jazz, from jazz to hip hop, and from hip hop to tap. It’s a wonderful sight, something you will never forget. The audience are sent into a trance; it’s as if they want to be in the story. Such unique colours and movements glide across the stage with the dancers. Who knew that someone could make something so hard look so easy and magical.

Image by Infame Photo/ Cristian Infante.

Image by marfis75.

Image by Muffet.

In class we are reading the book ‘The Outsiders’ and in the book the greasers use the word ‘tuff’ instead of ‘cool’.

For homework our teacher asked us to design a poster, online, using this website www.glogster.com.

We had to make a poster to display what we though was ‘tuff’.

This is my glog…

The last time I remember feeling like an outsider must have been when I moved to Compass from Doha College.

I had to leave all my friends at DC and move to a school where I knew nobody and nobody knew me. It was really hard, i don’t think i’ve ever felt this way before.

I miss my friends from DC a lot and we still keep in touch and meet up with each other a lot but after a few weeks of me being at Compass I went to see my old friends.

I’d seen them all since I’d left but it felt weird this time, there were new people in my old class, they were all friendly and acted the way I used to with my friends. I felt like an outsider. I didn’t know these new people, me and my friends were still really close but there were now new people, that I didn’t know.

My friends would talk to them about things that happened at school, things I hadn’t heard about or didn’t know about, I felt like an outsider.

Now, i’ve got to know all these new people and i’m friends with them too but at the beginning it was hard to realise that I had to make new friends and so did my old friends.

Image by davidspinks.

In class we’re still working on our magazine articles. I’m still working on my article about dancing and we worked on how to use ‘voice’ in our writing.

None of us had used voice before or even knew what voice was. We spent one lesson with Mr Raisdana working on different ways to use voice and how to explain what voice was in an understandable way.

We finally came up with the definition of voice being a way to express how you feel or how you want your readers to feel when reading the article. We did exercises in class where we were given a random picture, which would vary from a cheerleader to a ripped ticket and we had to write a short story on the spot, using the voice our teacher gave us. Once we had written a short story using a happy/excited voice we had to write a similar story, using the same picture, with a voice of the complete opposite.

We then went through what kind of language to use for different voices for example.

Angry voice – aggressive, rough, scary, dark, powerful, heavy and intense.

Our voice had to be full of energy, enthusiastic, striking and confident.

We went back home that day and added voice to our articles by using thesaurus’ to change words to make them more powerful and using different vocabulary.

This is the point where our class realised that adding ‘voice’ was quite hard if you didn’t have strong vocabulary.

The next one of the ‘six traits’ we used was word choice.

We have been working on this in class with our teacher and have discovered that our class need to widen our vocabulary because it’s very hard to do word choice without a wide vocabulary.

We have all used online thesaurus’ to help us through this trait and it has made our articles so much stronger and more professional sounding.

After having one lesson on word choice we went home and had to choose at least 10 ‘dull’ words from our article and use a thesaurus to make them more powerful and to help add voice. We then highlighted these so that our teacher could see what we had edited.

I found these traits quite challenging, and so did most of the class, because of our vocabulary. We have all realised that we need to work on extending our vocabulary for the future.

In history class we have been working on the topic of war int he 20th century. We all brought in 10 different pictures of war that we could find and then we separated them into groups. We then each chose a group each that we will be working on. I chose to do death statistics and casualties. Our teacher asked us to go home today and search youtube to try and find a video that was to do with your topic.

I chose this video because I thought it was good for statistics. Although this video is about the Iraq war during this century I think that this is a very useful video and it tells you a lot about the statistics, what’s happened and what is happening.

I hope you liked my choice of video.

In our last few classes we’ve been using the second writing trait: organisation.

We used this as the second step for our magazine article explained in the post before this about how we used the first writing trait: ideas.

For organisation we took our 3 main ideas and wrote them down into a chart which had 3 columns, one for each idea.

My main ideas were…

- Backstage at the dance show,

- What the show looked like,

- Feelings about dancing.

For each main idea we had to write down…

- What we already knew about that idea,

- Our opinions on the idea,

- Any questions we wanted to research or ask someone,

- Research we had done.

For some of our research we made a survey with a few questions on it that we though would help us to make our article better and we then sent this survey to our class mates and other people.

For our last lesson on Organisation our teacher taught us what transitions were and how to use them in our article. We then went home and added as many transitions to our article and highlighted them to try and make the article flow better. I found this quite easy to do because I already had a few transitions in my article but it was harder to find the right word to add into some sentences.

Our teacher also gave us this website to help us with transition words…

http://writing2.richmond.edu/writing/wweb/trans1.html

In class we are writing a magazine article at the moment and we had the choice to do any topic that we wanted.

Once we had chosen our topic our teacher decided that they were too wide so we had to narrow them down using the first writing trait: Ideas.

My main idea was to do my article on dancing but because that was such a wide topic we used the writing trait, ideas to narrow it down.

First I decided to narrow my topic down to something more personal so I chose to do the article about my dance show which was in December.

Then I randomly brainstormed 10 ideas about my dance show onto paper, my ideas were:

- Tap

- Jazz

- Ballet

- Emotions

- Chaos

- Energetic

- Music

- Lights

- Stage

- Colours

We then narrowed these ten things into 3 groups. If any of these ideas were similar we put them into one group and in total had three groups. These were…

- Feelings

- Backstage

- What I Can See

Then we had to choose one of these groups to write about for our article but I decided to write about all three and put them into one article.

After that we wrote down a topic sentence for our article, our teacher explained to us that we could just use a sentence like ‘I am going to tell you about my dance show.’ but instead he showed us how to make it more interesting for the reader by using different words and giving hints of what you are going to write about without saying it in a boring way.

My final topic sentence is…

There were shadows on the stage, the audience was silent, a beat began, the lights came on and the figures broke into dance.

I was supposed to put all of my text into Vokis, Movies and Voice Threads for my essay but my computer won’t let me make my movie so this is all my text but as soon as I have finished my work usng other programmes  I will post it.

Develop and adapt active reading skills and strategies –

I found that all of the reading skills helped me understand the book better but using visualization helped me the most. Whenever I read a book I find it easier to relate and understand it more if I imagine that I am there watching but not doing anything, just sitting at the side. For example in Lord of the Flies I imagined that I was just walking around the Island watching everything that was said in the book, painting a picture in my mind is a simple but fun way for me to enjoy and understand the book really clearly.

In class we had 2 activities that relate to visualization. One of these was ‘the meeting’, we came to class one day and were expecting a normal lesson, reading the book and talking about what we’ve read, but it wasn’t. As we walked in there was a sheet of paper on the desks with instructions on it. We asked our teacher what was going on but he wouldn’t answer and he just stood at the side recording us with a video camera. We read the sheet and it told us that our plane has crashed on an island and we are the only people left, just like Lord of the Flies. There were plain and simple instructions which ordered us to choose a leader and then answer a few questions all about why children tease each other and why we had elected the leader we did. Whilst we answered these questions as a group our teacher videoed the whole thing so he could show us later.

For the next activity we had to paint a two-sided picture, one of which was our interpretation of the happy side of nature, using phrases from the book, and the second was our interpretation of the darker, evil side of nature, again using phrases from the book. We then put these onto picnik, a picture editing website, and then we edited them using different tools and adding some text from the book.

At the beginning of the book I felt that it was hard to understand as we were just reading and I had never even thought to use visualization or any other reading skill for that matter. So as we read further into the book we used more reading skills which helped a lot, and the visualization helped me the most and it made everything much more interesting and exciting to read. Next time we read a book in class if we have an area that I don’t understand I will ask someone what it means and then once they have explained it I might draw a picture or make a video to help me understand it my own way using visualization.

Next time I would like to predict what will happen more. I would enjoy writing a piece of work, making up our own ending to the story or even half way through, predicting what’s going to happen and using imagination and maybe a fun activity to go with it like the painting and ‘the meeting’.

Understand and respond to ideas, viewpoint, themes and purposes in texts –

The main idea that if any person is taken out of or away from civilization they will turn into the id, anarchy like and angry, and Golding believes that this will happen to every person.

I understood this because during the book the author made it clear that eventually everyone will turn to anarchy by telling us how the characters changed, for example. At the beginning of the book Jack is very smart and clean, he was part of the choir, but as soon as civilization was taken away he turned very animal like and he didn’t care about anyone else because when you need food you just forget about everything else and you would do anything and hurt anyone to survive, and I think that this is the point that William Golding is trying to make.

Throughout the book Simon’s character doesn’t change very much, from the beginning he loved nature and he still did at the end. No matter what Jack said to Simon he wouldn’t change his mind about what he believed and how nature is a beautiful thing. Not only did the way he loved nature show him to be open-minded and rational but so did the fact that during the book he has no fears unlike Jack, who even though he was the leader and extremely angry. Jack had many fears, such as his fear of ‘the beastie’ but Simon didn’t believe that ‘the beastie’ was real and he even climbed to the top of the mountain to try and prove to everybody that it wasn’t. Simon was a very open person and he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind and tell people what he thought. He believed what he believed and for him that was that, and nobody could change it.

I agree with some reasons Golding used to show how people change when they need food or water but I don’t agree with the fact that he says that everyone changes because I believe that if somebody feels really strong about something they will stick to that no matter what they need. For example there are people every day that are stopping bad habits such as smoking because they feel strongly that it’s a bad thing to do. A lot of people in the world would probably be Jack like characters if they were put in the same situation but I believe that there would still be a fair amount of people who would stick to what they believe in, just like Simon did. I think this because a lot of people in the world believe what they think is right but some people believe stronger about their feelings than others. You can see examples of this happening everywhere in the world; in movies, on TV or just in everyday life. Something I have witnessed to prove why I think this is because a member of my family used to smoke and because they had enough willpower they decided to stop and even though when they are around other people smoking they feel strongly enough about not smoking that it doesn’t make them want to change.

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

Simile – Ape-like among the tangle of trees, page 49. This simile is describing Jack and to me this is means that he is very animal-like. He is very aggressive, strong and powerful. I think this is a very powerful simile as it makes you think of different ways to describe Jack, he could be a fierce animal or a creeper in the trees.

Personification – The fire growled at them, page 45. This personification describes that the fire was getting out of control, as if Golding used this personification to draw attention or to build tension, telling you something is going to happen with the fire. I also think that this makes people think because Piggy is talking about how the conch should represent rationalism and then suddenly the fire ‘growls’.

Simile – So that spots of blurred sunlight slid over their bodies or moved like bright, winged things in the shade, page 15. I love this simile; I think it explains exactly what the island looks like in this part of the book in one sentence. You can just tell by the way it’s written that it’s a happy, relaxing and calming place to be. The sun is shining everywhere and it shines over their bodies.

I liked to have all the metaphors, similes and personifications in the book because some of them were really interesting and really descriptive even in one sentence, I think that sentences like these make all books so much better because it gives you more of a picture in your mind.

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

The book, Lord of the Flies, was written in 1954 by an English novelist and this explains why some of the words used are old English and English slang.

William Golding was brought up to be a scientist but after 2 years of working on science at Oxford he changed his education path to emphasize on English. I think that this explains to us why he used such long descriptions of nature; he was going back to his past using science.  

He joined the Royal Navy when World War II broke out and was involved in the Navy for 5 years. He finished his naval career as a lieutenant in command of a rocket ship and after the war he began to start teaching and writing. Seeing all the things that he did when he was in the Royal Navy it changed his view of mankind. This quote from Golding himself proves it, “When I was young, before the war, I did have some airy-fairy views about man. But I went through the war and that changed me. The war taught me different and a lot of others like me.” This tells us that his ideas and views about man in the world changed after the things that he would have seen during the war.  

William Golding was born in Cornwall, England which is where my grandparents live. I found it very interesting to find out that he was born in Cornwall and that he spent his childhood holidays there because I go there every summer. I think that this may have influenced how he writes in this book. Cornwall is very green and the weather is usually warm over the summers, so maybe because he spent his childhood holidays there he used some of his memories in the book such as the long descriptions of nature. All the boys in the book are very different, and because Golding has seen all around England, I think that he tried to make clear, using speech, that all the characters were from different places in England.

Golding said that his hobbies are thinking, classical Greek, sailing and archaeology. I think that his hobbies had an impact on his novel, Lord of the Flies. This is because he could’ve chosen to put them on an island seeing as he liked to sail and maybe he had sailed to an island like the one in the book. Also he would’ve had to think hard about how to write this book because although it starts off slow you want to keep on reading because it keeps getting better and better.

From what we have read so far in the book I’m enjoying it. At the start I thought it was a little bit boring and slow but now as we are getting further into the book I seem to be liking it more and I think that it’s getting more interesting and I want to read on.

I like how all the characters represent different people in life, it seems like a very real book and it’s almost like we could all relate to it somehow because most personalities are shown in this book. Some of the descriptions about the forest and the Island are very long and they drag on for a bit but they help you to understand exactly how everything looks without giving it away too much which still lets you imagine what it looks like.

In class we have talked a lot about how the characters represent different personalities, such as: Simon is a peace-maker and he likes to make people happy, he loves nature.
Piggy is very intelligent but he isn’t very confident and everyone needs his help.
Jack is very angry most of the time and he doesn’t care about anyone but himself and he always wants to hunt.
Ralph is inbetween Piggy and Jack, he likes to take control.

We talked about how Jack represents the Id which means that he represents anarchy and is animal like, Piggy represents the Super-Ego which means that he is very calm, relaxed and rational and Ralph represents the Ego which is the balance between the Id and Super-Ego.

I chose this picture for this piece of work because I think that the colours represent different personalities.

Image by law_keven