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!