Month: September 2020

Kerri strug is my favorite athlete. She is a gymnast who competed in the olympics. She competed in the 1992 Olympics at the age of 14. Kerri was the youngest gymanst there. She also competed in the 1996 Olympics games. She won a gold medal in the 1996 Olypmics for her all-around performance.

Kerri is my favorite athlete because of what happened to her on her last event, vault, at the 1996 Olympics Games. One her first vault she collapsed in pain because she broke her ankle. Everybody was shocked and knew that without her high vault score, the US team would not be taking the gold medal home. Kerri ignores her foot and continues to stick her second vault, having to be carried off the mat after. Because of Kerri’s strong performance, the US team got to carry home the gold medal.

I have many dream vacations but if I could only take one it would be to Australia. I have always wanted to go to Australia since I was younger. Australia is a beuatiful country with many things to do. I love doing fun activitives outside and Austrialia offers that. I would want to go for the beautiful weather and pretty beaches. I would want to stay in villa on the beach where I can wake up and look at the beautiful beach view.

For the first three days I would want to go scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef. I have seen pictures of the reef and the pictures are very pretty. For another two days I would want to wake up early and go surfing for a few hours. The rest of the day I could spen laying out on the beach. One day that I am there I would like to go skydiving over the water. Skydiving is very scary to some people, but I personally think that it would be very exciting. Finally, I would like to spend a few extra days to just relax, go to the beach, and explore the many cities.

This Rough Magic by Mary Stewart is about a young women named Lucy Waring who goes to visit her sister on the island of Corfu. One of the residents in Corfu is presumed dead while another fisherman is found dead within the same two weeks. Stewart’s book is very mysterious and has a lot of suspense in it. This is a genre that I enjoy to read, but the plot is not my favorite. The diction and word choice is very odd and is sometimes hard to read. This causes me to be confused sometimes throughout the novel.

“Gale’s reaction to the news of Yanni’s death. He had not been surprised at the news that a body was on the rocks” (107).

This quote really stands out to me because Lucy has such high suspicions of Gale. I find this very interesting because she barely knows the people on Corfu and is not very familiar with the land. She is already assuming that the people are up to something and behind the murders or illegal activities going on on the island. I think that this says a lot about her character. She is a very curious person who can let her mind wander. She has some crazy assumptions on some of the locals and I am excited to see what she will come up with next.

Ryleigh Volland

Mrs. Duke

English III/Block 3

09/21/20

Expository

Growth in Reading and Writing

Learning to read and write as a child is something that I always found very fun and important. I used to love to read and would go home after school some days and read multiple books in a day when I was in lower school. I would come back to school the next day and tell the teacher and my friends about the books that I read. I remember taking AR tests and always being so excited about taking them and getting my score higher and higher. I always had fun taking the AR test and would get so upset if I wouldn’t get 100% on them. These small chapter books would entertain me for hours at a time. I think that me growing up being so into reading and writing helped me become a strong reader throughout lower and middle school.

List

My Favorite Books I Have Read:

1. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown
2. Pinkalicious series by Victoria Kann
3. Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne
4. The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins
5. The Maze Runner series by James Dashner
6. Where the Red fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
7. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before By Jenny Han
8. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
9. Paper Towns by John Greene (summer reading)

This is a list of some of the books that I really enjoyed reading growing up and in highschool. These books helped me become the reader I am today. I started off reading small picture books or books for smaller children like numbers one through three on my list. My favorite childhood book was Pinkalicious because there was a whole series. My mom would read one to me every night before bed. Soon I started reading more chapter books and having to really understand what is going on in the story to be able to read it. I used to have a notecard in middle school when I would read chapter books and write one sentence about every chapter that I read. I was getting really good grades in middle school in reading and writing. It was one of my favorite subjects because it was more laid back and I was really good at it. I could never put a book down.

Short Story

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KZyBjFuyNHC4pMDfwRFERfFhnOxSrXzYqoKu6ccdoKM/edit?usp=sharing

This is a short story that I wrote in the beginning of freshman year. As a freshman, I remember being so proud of myself and thought this short story was amazing, but looking back at it I see so many problems. The requirements of the short story has to have dialogue and conflicts. The conflicts that I came up with, like missing too much school and the family issues, just didn’t fit right in the story. Also, I was never the best at adding dialogue into my writings and it is very bland and boring to read. I see so many things I would change. Even my grammar and punctuation has improved. I would also change major things like the topic and plot. Freshman year is when I started to really write more papers and start to understand what I was reading. I was surely not the best writer in my class. I was more of an average writer. I think that this made me start to dislike it more because I would get discouraged by my classmates that were amazing writers. I also could never understand books or readings as well as others. Other people could take the meanings of books deeper than I ever could. I feel like this is the starting point of when English class got harder for me and I started disliking it more.

Report Card

These are screenshots of my english grades from sixth grade to my sophomore year. I always had an A in english throughout lower school and middle school. Once I got to highschool and started drifting away from reading and writing my grades started to struggle a bit. My grades have now been lower A’s or B’s. I don’t consider these to be bad grades, but I know that I could definitely do better. I have definitely improved and grown as a writer and reader in highschool and know that I am a much stronger writer and reader than I used to be, but there is definitely still lots of growing room. 

Journal

I am Older Now

Now that I am older, I don’t find joy in things like reading. Growing up, I could read for hours on end and never get bored. My attention span is not as well as it used to be. I think this is due to the fact that I have a phone now and I always want to be texting my friends or doing something fun. Reading used to relax me, but now I feel as if it is almost a chore. If I find a good book that I enjoy, I like reading it, but never think to pick it up when I stop. This is a habit that I hope can change as I grow older and as I learn to become a better reader.

Now that I am older, I don’t find joy in things like writing. Writing used to be so fun for me. I could write for hours on end about my daily life or a book that I was reading. As I got into eighth grade and high school, I started to become a weaker writer than many of my classmates. I think that this discouraged me from writing and just caused me to lose interest in it. I hope that maybe one day I can start to enjoy writing again even if it is just simply writing a paragraph or two every night about the day I had.

I have always wanted to be a physical thearpists when I was younger. I had many injuries to simple ankle sprains to having a fractured back being in gymnastics for many years. Being in and out of thearpy for all these injuries made me want to be a physical thearpists. As I got a little older and started learning about healthy foods and unhelthy foods, I now want to be a nutrionist. This is something that is very intersting to me.

In my future, I would always like to have a husband and three kids. I want two older boys and one younger girl. I want to live somehwere in the south, maybe Alabama, in a house on the outskirts of a city with lots of land. I want to have a stable income and to be able to stop working once I have kids or to not work as much so I can be a mother. I think that being at home with your babies or young kids is very important.I’m sure my future won’t hold out to be as I dream and I wonder how much my dreams will change within the next few years.

We have been working on our multi-genre papers this week. I think that this paper is very interesting and is a good paper to be doing in our class. At first, I was very confused on what the project was and I think many of my classmates were confused at first too. We all asked questions and finally started to understand it more. Also, after I figured out what I was going to write about, it helped me start to understand the paper.

My paper is going to be about how I have grown and a reader and writer throughout my life. It’s going to start when I am in lower school and loved reading and writing. Throughout the paper I grow and slowly start to dislike reading and writing as much as I used to. I think that this is a very fun paper and am excited to finish it.

The novel that I am reading is called This Rough Magic by Mary Stewart. This book takes place on an island called Corfu. The setting of the novel is very confusing to me. They explain the setup of the island and describes where everybody’s houses are compared to each-others. This part confused me because its hard to explain a map of something without physically looking at one. I think once I keep reading further into the book I will understand it more.

Another thing that I found a little confusing was just plot of the story so far. The book has started off very slow so that it can introduce the setting at the characters. Nothing has really happened so far and it is just people talking and describing the island. I think this book will get interesting due to what I have read on the back of the books summary.

One thing that has made me really happy this week is going 2-0 in our volleyball season so far. We were really nervous going into our first game due to the fact that we didn’t practice for two weeks because of quarantine and other schools did. We had two days of practice where we worked very hard and hustled in the gym to prepare for our first game. It’s also stressful having to deal with social distancing, masks, and sanitizing the equipment at practice.

Our first game was against St. Micheals we were really scared ro play them because they have some very strong hitters. We played to five sets and won three. St. Micheals won two sets. We played better than what we were expecting this game. Our next game was against Brusley. We won three out of five sets again, but we did not play as well as we thought we could have played. Theses events made me happy because we are finally getting excited for the season.