Johan and Kasym's Weekly Update

Hi, and welcome to this week’s Weekly Update. We will be talking to you about starting our Fantasy writing, learning fractions in math, and Science Lab with Mr. Kimzey. They were all fun, some were interesting and some were challenging, but they were all part of our week.

In writing, we started our fantasy story. There were some limitations, one of them was to only write up to 5 pages. If you go over that, you are going overboard and your writing can get really confusing. One more limitation was that we only could have 3 characters, one protagonist, one antagonist, and one side kick. If you go over that, then your writing can be harder to write. We started off by getting our ideas by relating to our own experiences. For example, if you were scared of heights, you could write a story about jumping off a plane and going into a magical world! We had to come up with a couple of storylines that we could choose later on for our story. Then we wrote some things our characters will be going through in our story. For example, John had to destroy the wand of power, because it made the sky dark. But, it was protected and hidden in the forest. So, he went and fought for the wand. Yay! He broke it. This helped us know what our stories were about. After planning our story, it was time to think of our protagonist. We drew our character on a piece of A4 paper and wrote down his/her traits. We could only draw our protagonist. When all of us finished our protagonist, we started thinking of our setting. We started by reading some extracts. An extract is a short bit that has been taken from the book. We read an extract from Narnia, The Wizard Of Oz, and Peter Pan. Then each book club wrote an extract from their book. That’s where we are in our fantasy writing.  

For maths, we learnt how to add and subtract fractions with unlike denominators. The denominator is the number on the bottom of a fraction. What you have to is change the denominators so that they are the same. For example if you had 5/6 + 2/5,  you would have to change the denominators so that they are the same by finding the LCD, the least common denominator. For example, the LCD for six and five is 30, because if you list down the multiples six and five, the lowest number that is the same is 30. After that you have to multiply the numerator, the number on the top, by whatever you multiplied the denominator by. Six times five equals 30, so you multiply five by five and get 25. You do the same to ⅖ and you end up with, 25/30 + 12/30 = 37/30. That is an improper fraction which can be turned into a mixed number. We haven’t learnt how to change them though, so that is what we would leave it at. After all our lessons were done we had a mock test. This is a test that is nearly exactly the same as our real test but it doesn’t count for our grade. Mock tests are so that you can see what you have to work on. We found it quite helpful and I think that we will now be better prepared for our test.

In science lab, we learnt about the plant’s vascular system. The vascular system is the way that plants get water and minerals to flow throughout their body. It is nearly the same as the human’s vascular system but the plants don’t have hearts to pump the water. We tested it on celery, first we cut about a centimeter off of our stock of celery. After that we studied the cut part with a microscope to see the vascular tubes. Some of us ate it, but it wasn’t washed so that might not have been such a good idea. After that, we scraped off the first layer of the celery using a scalpel. The scalpel was VERY sharp, so we had to be really careful. When we had cut off enough to see the vascular tubes, we had to remove them from the celery. To do that, we had to pull the scalpel down on either side of the tube. After that, we had to pluck out the tube. It was really hard and a lot of people only got a little bit. Some of us tried to eat the tube but, it took ages to chew and swallow. Even after the investigation we are were not how the water got sucked up. Next science session, we will find out how it is done.  

We hope that you have enjoyed reading about our amazing week. It was really fun to write about our Fantasy writing, learning fractions, and Science Lab with Mr. Kimzey. If you would like to hear more about next week, you should come back next week to read Declan and Greg’s Weekly Update. Please leave comments on what you think about our week.