Mish-Mash #2

I know I haven't written in a long time, and I don't really have an excuse, except that I was busy with school, which isn't much of an excuse. I thought I would post this picture of the first day of school. Sasha looks really excited, and Ellie...not so much.

School is going well, I really like most of my teachers and so far nothing seems very difficult. Well, French is a little tough, but nothing that I can't handle.  I've became friends with a new girl, who isn't my class, who is from Australia! Why anyone would move from Australia to Winnipeg is beyond me.

Sasha has a reading log she has to fill out each month, and in September the goal for the class was 100 minutes. She read 615 minutes!

I have discovered I really like key lime yogurt. Unfortunately, Ellie and Sasha do too.

In my dance class this year, I am with 7 other girls. They are all older than me. Much older than me. The two ages I know for sure are 16 and one in grade 12. Other than that, I am really enjoying dance. It is much more relaxed than last year.

We listened to one of Stuart McLean's stories in Language Arts (or ELA or English). It was so awesome and funny.

Yeah. That's it for now.

Winkler BIble Camp

On August 6th to 10th I was at Winkler Bible Camp for the sixth or seventh summer in a row. I really love camp and I always wish it was longer. I came to camp with my friend Madi, who I went with last year. We had so much fun together. This year I was in Intermediate camp for the first time. I was in cabin Hope and my counselors were named Brenna and Brooklyn. I really loved intermediate camp and thought it was so much better then juniors. We got to have parties and special things after the juniors went to bed, longer and better chapels, and we got to pick our own activities. We got a slip of paper with different blanks in it for each activity time, and then there would be tables with the different choices we could sign up for at that time. I liked that because if you don't want to do an activity, you don't have to sign up for it. For instance, I don't like the bikes activity, so I didn't sign up for it at all. But I love the climbing wall, so I signed up for it 3 times. The climbing wall is one of my favourite activities. I successfully climbed Face Lift, the 4th hardest one on the second try and attempted Crevice, the 3rd hardest one that I climbed about halfway. Anyway, I really loved the nighttime parties we had. One was at the beach where we roasted hot dogs and marshmallows, and one was in the barn loft, where there was different slushie drinks, snacks, and dancing. They don't keep any animals in that barn by the way. Those were so fun. We also had a really fun night game that was kind of like capture the flag. Everyone wore black and it was really dark outside. You would have to make it to these different stations and try to complete these challenges to get a coloured rock. Then you would have to bring the rocks to the middle of the field without being caught. The whole time there are counselors trying to catch you and take you to jail, where you have to complete a challenge given to you. I only got caught once. While we were there these boys had to sing a song for the challenge and they sang boyfriend in these really creepy voices. Me and my friend stayed just to listen to it. It was so funny! After the game was over we had fireworks. The food at camp was mostly good, they are not getting water from a well now so the water doesn't taste like blood anymore. The best meal was the baked oatmeal for breakfast. The songs were so much better then last year. The theme song was especially better then last years Suit Up. I really enjoyed the songs in the intermediate chapel a lot more then the songs in the regular chapels. I had a really awesome time at camp and I can't wait to go back next year!

A Long Trip

Driving from Burnaby, BC to Winnipeg MB. Mostly driving, yes. But also some exploring of Seattle, Montana, and even Fargo. We started in Langley, BC for one night where we had some trouble with the GPS and at the front desk of the hotel. then we drove to Seattle where we had a long wait at the border, but  finally drove up to the Westin Seattle, a very nice hotel where we got THREE rooms that were all connected for a good price, thanks to our friend Lisa. We stayed in Seattle for 3 nights. I really loved Pike Place Market and the gum wall, which is a ally and the walls are completely covered in gum. It was really cool. Here are some pictures of our time in Seattle.

This is the sign outside Pike Place Market

This is our hotel's two towers. We stayed on the 36th floor.

This is the view outside one of our windows.

Here we are at the original Starbucks.

This is at Pike Place Market again, watching the fish throwers. When someone orders fish one of the guys picks up the fish and throws it back and forth to the other guy a few times. They're funny and it's cool to watch. They are like fish guys and entertainers. 

This is at the gum wall

One day we drove to a little place called Fremont. It is a really interesting and quirky place and there is a lot of public outside art that people can look at, like the Fremont troll under the bridge.

Or the giant rocket ship.

Or the statues at the bus stop!

We had lots of fun in Seattle but soon it was time to drive for 10 HOURS to Butte, Montana. The driving was okay, altogether we watched 3 movies. In between all of that I made an awesome crayon creation, covered my clipboard in pipe cleaners, and drew some awesome stick people including a ninja, a chef, and a scuba diver. We were in Butte for one night and then we drove to West Yellowstone. On the way we stopped at the Louis and Clark Caverns. You can go right inside them with a tour guide. First it was a 20 minute walk to the entrance of the caves. The caverns were some of the coolest things I have ever done.  

It probably took about two hours to get through all the cave rooms. It was worth it! After we drove to a little "working cowboy town" called  Ennis for lunch. We ate at a place called Yesterdays which is a little diner and soda fountain inside a drugstore. The food was pretty good but the milkshake was even better! 

The next night we were in West Yellowstone. It was on the Fourth of July so we went to watch the parade.  No good pictures of that.


The next day we drove through and explored Yellowstone. We drove until we saw these steam pits and geysers and other cool stuff.

It was all really beautiful and cool. I really liked seeing it. Next we went to see Old Faithful.    The area around it has lots of benches for people to sit. We found a spot and waited for it to start. We kept saying "any minute now!" and "Ohh oh ohhh!" but it didn't start for a while. It did start in the amount of time they said it would though. And when t did it was really cool. I didn't expect for it to be so high! It was really really awesome.

We drove through the park some more, stopping at different lookout points, and then we were off to Billings. 

We stayed in Billings for two nights and then we drove another 9 hours to Fargo. We watched some really good movies throughout the entire trip like Cheaper by the Dozen 1 and 2 and Bridge to Terabithia. I really liked Bridge to Terabithia because it starred Josh Hutcherson who is in The Hunger Games as Peeta Mellark, and Anna-Sophia Robb from Soul Surfer as Bethany Hamilton. The driving went okay. There were no major fights or anything. In Fargo we did a lot of swimming and shopping. The pool was nice and big with a great water slide. We spent a lot of time there. We also spent a lot of time shopping at Kohls, Target, and Scheils. After two nights we drove to Winnipeg and had to do a lot of hard unpacking. I think that unpacking is harder than packing because you are looking for places to put things instead of just putting things in boxes. But maybe that's because I didn't do hardly any packing, I don't know. So now we're here and settled in, and this post took forever to write, like 3 days, and now it's time for supper.

Stuff

First, movies.

On Thursday night I went to my friend Maddy's house for a sleepover because there wasn't any school on Friday. My friend Emilia was also there. We got a fair bit of sleep for a sleepover, about 8 hours! We watched an awesome movie that I hadn't seen before. Cheaper by the Dozen 2!!! The 2 is very important as I liked it much better than the first one. It is so funny and it really is an awesome movie. I told my mom that we have to watch it together now. My favourite character is Sara, and I also like the twin girls, I don't remember their names. One of my favourite parts is when Tom is fixing the dock at the lake and he is listening to music. He starts dancing in a really funny way. He reminded me of my mom!

Another movie which my family watched yesterday was Supersize Me. Finally! I have been wanting to watch it and I found it really interesting and also funny. My favourite part was when he was eating McDonalds in his van and he starts talking about "McGurgles", "McHeadache", "McGas, "and being "McCrazy". I found it funny and weird that his girlfriend was vegan! I thought it was a really good movie.

Next, an awesome new blog.

Today in the paper there was an article about a girl from Scotland who had a blog where she posted pictures of her school lunch every day. She rated the lunch on how good it tasted, how healthy it was, and even wrote how many hairs it had in it! The school banned her taking any more pictures of her lunch, even though most of the lunches looked pretty good and she posted mostly positive things. The president of something-school-related-but-I-can't-remember-what lifted the ban and said she could continue posting her lunches on her blog. Her blog has become quite popular and has many, many people looking at it. I am going to post the link and please check it out because it is really good. She hasn't even been doing it for that long. You should start at her first post though. Click here to check it out! 

Finally, dance!

I had my dance recital last week and it went really well! Except for the fact I accidentally wore my socks on stage and I slipped getting up from the ground. They were at least grey! And short socks! No one could tell! I hope. Anyway, in my last post I said my coustume was supposed to be red and black but they ran out so it was yellow and black instead. Well, here is a picture of the bumblebee outfit.

The best part was waiting back stage after I went on. Me and my friends had lots of fun running around in the theater, up and down stairs, even outside! It was hot in the dressing room! When were out side my friend thought we couldn't get back in to the dressing room so she climbed through the window and we just opened the door and went inside. It was so funny! We also were pretending to be spies rolling around upstairs!

That's all I have to say for now!

Mish-Mash

Hi


-My dance recital is coming up soon, and I am very excited! I am taking contemporary dance this year and I really love it. Our dance this year is called Conflict. It's very cool. Our costumes are the only disapointment as they were supposed to be red and black but they ran out and so now they are yellow and black. The Conflict of the Bumblebees!


-Have you ever wondered, if fat and slim are opposites, why do "fat chance" and "slim chance" mean the same thing?




-I really love babysitting. Here are the three main families I babysit.

Alejandro and Susie

Vivi and Elise

Ethan and Evie

-I really love the book series The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. It's really good. I can't wait to go to the library and get the rest of the series

- The Cookie Crumble frappachino at Starbucks is so good. Very very good.

Update on Battle of the Books

My last post explains what Battle of the Books is. I'm not going to post a link to it, because you can just scroll down and read it for yourself. If you are to lazy to scroll down a little to read it, well, to bad for you.


Anyway, my team won the final of the battle of the books in our school, so we got to go to Gilmore to compete against the rest of the schools. We all expected not to do that well, especially after we were told one team had only got 3 questions wrong during the entire competition! But amazingly, we pulled ahead in the first half of the competition, we were so far ahead, that we missed the last 2 questions yet we still Won the competition!!!!!!!! We all couldn't believe it! It was so much fun and I really wish I could do it again next year. We didn't win a prize or even got a certificate, but I don't really care too much about that. I really loved my team and it was so fun to be a part of!

Battle of the Books

Battle of the Books is a competition where grade 6's and 7's get 8 books they are supposed to try to read. Each classroom gets 2 or three of each book. Everyone gets the books. While you are reading one of the books you are supposed to write down questions like, "In which book is there an earthquake?" There is a minimum of 10 questions for each book. We are all spit into teams. My team is called the Black Jaguars and I am the co-captain. Then once a week we meet in the library to have a "battle". Every team has large cards with pictures of all the books on them. Mrs. Clark, our librarian, asks one of the questions that someone has written and if we think know the answer, we hold the card with the answer on it up when she says go.  So the point is to read as many of the books as you can, and to write good questions because it is an advantage if your question is picked, because then of course you will know the answer. Each correct answer is worth a point, the team with the lowest amount of points is eliminated. The winning team after all the battles then moves on to compete with winning teams from other schools. Today we had a battle and my team won today with 26 points. 2nd place was a tie with 23 points. There are now only 3 teams left playing and 2 more battles. My team has been doing very well because we have 3 really good and fast readers on it and we are also very good guessers. We have either won or tied for 1st every battle so far.

There are a lot of very good books to read for Battle of the Books, I have read all of them. They try to have a mix of genras. My favourite was actually a graphic novel called Smile by Raina Telgemeier. She kind of draws with a For Better or For Worse style. It tells the true story of the author. Basically, the girl gets her two front teeth knocked out in grade 6, they try to put them back in again but the bone above them was damaged so they move up farther than all the other teeth, so then she gets a retainer with fake teeth attatched, and then she has to have braces which don't help,  then surgery, headgear, braces with rubber bands that stretch diagonally across her mouth, and then finally her teeth look normal. Well, almost normal. It says in the book they still look a little weird and then the dentist says, "We did the best we could considering we basically rearanged your entire mouth!" So while this is all going on we follow her to high school where she has to deal with an earthquake, major embarrasment, and friends that aren't so friendly. It's actually a really good book. 

My least favourite book was Ark Angel. It's a spy book, following a 14 year old spy named Alex Rider. I'm just not interested in those kind of books and it was really quite boring at some parts.

Anyway,  this is what Smile looks like:

Design an Ad Contest

Every year, a contest is held with The Burnaby Now, where classes from many different elemantary schools design an ad for a buisness in Burnaby. Each class that participates gets a different buisness. This year, my class got The Burnaby Fire Department. Every one in the class had to design an individual ad. A photographer from the Burnaby Now comes to each class that is involved and takes pictures of us working on them. Some of them were featured in the newspaper, like I was! Here I am with two of my good friends Maddy and Julia.

Each buisness then picks the one they think is the best and The Burnaby Now also puts it in the newspaper. And guess what? Mine won! Here it is...

The Hunger Games!

I finally saw The Hunger Games movie last Sunday with my mom and my dad. When we got to the movie theater I noticed one of my good friends from school was also there with her mom and her sister, so we all sat together. I thought that the movie was absolutely amazing, of course. They picked exactly the right actor  to play Katniss. She was very very good. I liked the characters who played Gale and Peeta except Josh, who played Peeta didn't really look right for me. I also thought, although the actor who plays Haymitch is a really great actor, he didn't look right. In the book, specifically, it says that he is from the Seam, and it also says that people from the Seam all have the same curly dark brown hair and grey eyes. So why did they decide to give him long straight blond hair! It isn't right. He did do an amazing job of being Haymitch but he didn't look the part. In the movie, District 12 looks sort of like it's from the Depression or something. I like how they made it look very grey and white and hopeless. But I also think that it looked to old fashioned. It is supposed to be in the future, so there should be some futuristic look to it, even in District 12. On the other hand, the Capitol was portrayed perfectly, exactly like I imagined, including how the people in the Capitol dressed and looked. Some of my favourite parts of the movies are when Peeta asks Cesar Flickerman if he smells like roses in his interview, when Katniss shoots the arrow at the apple in her training session and Haymitch's reaction afterwards, and when Rue steals Cato's knife. I thought that Rue looked perfect, but she is supposed to be 12 and I think she acted more like a 6 or 7 year old. Same with Prim. I wish they would of had more of Gale and Katniss hunting in the woods, because you don't get to know Gale in the movie like you do in the book. Also, the mutated wolves in the movie were a little disappointing the way that they looked. They looked the big, fat wolves with the face of a pug. They also didn't show how the wolves are supposed to look like all the dead tributes. The violence in the movie was actually not as bad as I was expecting. Gary Ross, the director of the movie said that they didn't want to try to take away from the violence, because that is basically what the book is all about, how horrible and bad violence is. But when there was a lot of fighting, like at the Cornucopia, the camera shots of the bodies and the fighting moved to fast for you to register what was being shown, which I liked. Speaking of the Cornucopia, again, it says specificaly that is is gold and shaped like, well, a cornucopia. But in the movie, it is silver! And a bit more geometric and blocky than I was expecting, although it is in the future. Even though I thought that some parts in the movie could have been a little better, all in all, I think it was potrayed perfectly. I can't wait for the second one, Catching Fire!

Here are some pictures from the movie!

Katniss hunting in the woods.

Effie Trinket and Katniss at the reaping.

Gale and Katniss in the meadow.

Peeta and Katniss in the Training Center

Rue in the arena.

District 12, where Katniss lives.

Now you have to read the book or watch the movie!

Maplelea Doll Photo Shoot

Me and my sisters all have a Maplelea doll, which are Canadian dolls from each with it's own name, personality, place it comes from in Canada and a journal in which it tells your dolls story and space where you can write your own. You can also order clothes for your doll from a catalogue they send out. Me, Ellie, and Sasha decided to lay out all our clothes and create as many different outfits as we can. We came up with 23.  Each person took turns creating and outfit for their doll and came up with a name for the outfit. Here are the pictures!

This is Brianne, Sasha's doll from Dauphin, Manitoba!

Brianne: A Date with Daddy

This is Saila, pronounced Sigh-la, Ellie's doll from Nunavut.

Saila: Little Miss not so Popular (I don't know why she chose this name)

This is Alexi, my doll from Toronto, Ontario

Alexi: Fall Time

Saila: Ballet Girl

Alexi: Rock Star

Brianne: A Day in Funky Town

Saila: Little Ladybug

Brianne: Baseball Star

Alexi: Pretty Pink

Saila: Kind of Awkward 

Alexi: Sleepyhead

Brianne: Snow Day

Brianne: Purplelicious

Saila: Stupendous Purple

 Alexi: Winter Night

Brianne: Kind of Shy

Alexi: All Dressed Up

Saila: A Rainy Day in Vancouver

Saila: Hip Hoppin

Brianne: Straight A Student

Alexi: Pajama Party

Brianne: Out and About

Alexi: Outside Adventures

Saila: Going to a Party