ELEPHANT RUN

Author’s Note: I wrote this as an assignment in the reading lab, to see if we could write a retelling of out favorite book we read over the summer.

Elephant Run is about a boy whose dad gets taken away by Japanese soldiers, from the family elephant plantation. His world is turned upside down when he is locked in his room under the control of the Japanese and not given any contact with his father. When he is eventually taken out of his room he isn’t sent back to his mother like he was told he was going to be, he was lied to. 

THREE TRUTHS AND A LIE

Author's Note: I wrote this paragraph about how my middle name is combined between my mom's name and my dad's name. I worked on trying not to write run on sentences because I have been.  

My middle name is combined between my mom’s name and my dad’s name. Well before I was born my parents didn’t want to know if I was a boy or a girl so they had to decide on a boy’s name and a girl’s name. Well the boys name was the easiest they took my dad’s dads name Curtis and my mom’s dad’s name Paul and said if I was a boy my name would be Curtis Paul. Well they had some weird girl names picked out to but settled on Morgan but couldn’t think of a middle name that would work, and apparently one day my dad was on his way to work and thought about the middle name Carol. He was thinking about it and used the first three letters of my mom’s name Kar for Karen and the last three of his ale for Dale. So my name was Morgan Karale and it’s combined between my mom’s name and my dad’s name. Well no one in my family can spell my middle name because it’s not the generic way to spell it. But the nice part is, is that I’m not the only person in my family with a weird middle name. My older cousin Taylor has a weird middle name too. Her middle name is Frances after my uncles grandma, and we all call her Frank because of it. So weird middle names are common in my family apparently and you know what we really don’t care because we like our names it’s not like we had any say in it.   

BOWLING

Author's Note: I wrote this creative piece about bowling in Writing Circles. I wrote about how bowling is a harder sport then anything else I have ever seen. But it looks easy because bowlers make it look that way.
 

Bowling is not an easy sport. Everyone says that bowling is so easy and that the hardest sports are football and basketball. Well some people also say bowling isn’t a sport same with dancing and cheer-leading. But their actually wrong those are all sports every one of them, but I also have to say that bowling may be harder than dancing and cheer-leading and football. This is for one reason only and it’s because you can practice all of these sports in your backyard bowling you can’t do that and it’s definitely not a free sport not like any sport really is. In bowling you are trying to get a 14-16 pound ball 60 feet from the foul line to the head pin which doesn’t seem that long because bowlers make it look easy and it’s not. Also dancers may have to hold uncomfortable positions for long periods of time and have their feet hurt but at least at school your sitting down most of the time so your not always on your feet. Bowling your fingers swell up and your feet hurt and your back and shoulders hurt and your knees hurt it’s pretty much totally pain all the time. Also dancers and cheerleaders may have 3-4 hour practices. I have to go in everyday right after school and bowl 3 games and then stay for even more practice so from most of the time 3 o’clock in the afternoon till about 9 o’clock at night everyday give or take. Also sometimes I get called in at like two in the morning because my coach forgot to run something with me and this is before school dancers and cheerleaders don’t have to do that. It’s pain that is all worth it though because ever since I told my dad I wanted to be the best at about 4 years old he got me a coach. Well I learned over the years I am only as good as the people I can beat and strive to be better than the people I can’t beat and then when I run out of people to beat I am the best. Well to achieve this goal it comes with the pain and the swelling and the torn shoulders I mean I take the pain because I want to be the best not because I just like to bowl I want to be the best and I’m determined to get there.

WATER

Author's Note: I wrote this piece about water in Writing Circles. In this piece I worked on explaining how water makes me feel and not just a random story about water.

Water makes me feel… like I can just have fun and that life isn’t all stuck in a subdivision, in a town, where you can almost reach out your window and touch the house next to you. You can’t control water just like you can’t control life; water goes where ever it wants to and same with people. Water is what people think of when they just want to get away and think. I always look at water when I just feel like thinking or play in water to make everything else disappear it makes me think of being free and not being stuck in my house and trapped. Water is what makes me feel good. Water is just what it is it’s water you make of it what you make of it and different people think of water in different ways, but water is just as simple as that, water is water.

COYOTE

Author's Note: I wrote this creative piece on coyotes for are writing circles. It is about a fake story of us seeing a coyote up north and in this piece I worked on trying not to make run on sentences.

One day we were walking down the street and saw a shaggy dog run across the road into the ditch at Grandma’s house. We were looking at the water and on our way back there was this, what looked like a stray dog, and then when we saw it and actually could see it we realized it was a coyote. It jumped out of the ditch and ran away down the road. It was really scary seeing a wolf sort of thing, shaggy dog whatever it was it didn’t look normal. The coyote didn’t even bother us almost like it didn’t notice us but it makes me think and kind of laugh, to think about what would have happened if it would of attacked us I could have seen my mom rolling into the ditch on the other side of the road screaming and sobbing and me not knowing what to do which kind of made me chuckle a little bit to myself. But it didn’t attack us and just walked away like we were nothing. Later that evening we heard him hollering at the moon and realized that it was the coyote we had seen earlier that day.

BE A LORAX NOT A ONCE-LER

Author’s Note: In this essay I worked on developing a variety of methods to begin sentences and paragraphs and increase the use of complex vocabulary. Also I worked on improving methods of transitioning from one paragraph to the next to a proficient level.

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not” (68).  A common way people interpret this quote is if you care about something a lot then do something about it don’t just stand back and watch it get worse.Some people do not care about the environment and it’s mostly big companies like the Once-ler and his Thneeds, exampled in this book. In The Lorax by Dr. Seuss, all of the characters have a very symbolic meaning in the world, and if you think about it you can see just what all of their purposes are. You have to start to care more about the ecosystem than you already do because the environment is the surroundings or conditions in which a person, animal and plant lives and operates, and in this story the Once-ler just kept on thinking about how he could make more and more money and not about what he would leave behind once it was all done and over with. Readers should make a connection between the make believe characters in this story into real world situations, and what we can learn from history so history doesn’t repeat itself. Earth is our home and you have to be able to make the change and not just hope it happens.

There are four main living things in this book that have a really big meaning. Yes, they may just be made up animals or trees or plants. Besides all of those things if you really look and try to understand what all of these things mean, you will find that they all have real world connections to them. The one thing that was the hardest for me to connect to and truly find it’s meaning though were the Truffula Trees, and then when I really thought about it I realized that they represent agriculture. Which is the science or practicing of farming, including cultivation of the soil for the growing of crops and the rearing of animals to provide food, wool, and other products. This kind of reminds me of the rain forest if we keep clearing the rain forest then we will loose animal populations that will have to travel elsewhere to get their needs met, many will become extinct. Every year an area of rain forest the size of New Jersey is cut down and destroyed. The plants and animals that used to live in these forests either die or must find a new forest to call their home. Why are rain forests being destroyed? Humans are the main cause of rain forest destruction. We are cutting down rain forests for many reasons, mostly including: wood for both timber and making fires, agriculture for both small and large farms, land for poor farmers who don’t have anywhere else to live, grazing land for cattle, pulp for making paper, road construction and extraction of minerals and energy. The Once-ler did only a couple of these things when he cut down the Truffula Trees. He cut them down to grow his business and then also realized that he could build bigger roads and then a bigger factory. He should have realized that for every tree he cut down he should have planted five new ones, but he didn’t think of that all he did was hurt the environment.

Even though Truffula Trees have big meaning in this book so does Grickle Grass. Grickle Grass represents the thistled mess we will be left with if we do not care for what we have been given. Grickle Grass is what you would be left with if you cut down all the trees. Trees have more meaning than most people think. Animals use trees to live in and they also use them for protection. Also trees help hold the brush down like the Grickle Grass, and the Grickle Grass ends up being the only thing left because everything moves away and it’s not a good environment to grow anything. No one wants to live in a world full of Grickle Grass, it would almost be like watching paint dry, you have nothing to look at and trees not only give us oxygen to breath but they also make the world more interesting to look at.

Grickle Grass is important, but so are the animals that live in the environment. The Bar-ba-loots, along with the Swamy Swans and the Humming Fish represent the lifeforms we are disrupting by polluting their environment and destroying their habitats. This relates to the polar bears whose habitat is being destroyed because of all are pollution. Animals habitats are being destroyed because no one cares, and if they do care their not trying to do anything about it. Yes you will see polar bears in zoos but their not going to be where they belong. This is just like what the Lorax said to the Once-ler “Your glumping the pond where the Humming-Fish hummed! No more can they hum, for their gills are all gummed.” (56)What this means is that even though you think that all of your polluting isn’t going anywhere or doing anything, it is it’s endangering all of the animals in are rivers, lakes and streams.

The Bar-ba-loots, Swamy Swans and Humming-Fish are all really good examples of animals that are being endangered, but the Once-ler is the most important figure in this whole book. The Once-ler represents big business’s  that are to busy looking at the profit line to take heed to what damage their business is doing. They see the “EPA” (United States Environmental Protection Agency) as a nuisance. Once in a while they will stop and give help to a given situation but mostly they think of the EPA as a bunch of tree huggers. This is exactly what the Once-ler and the Lorax were. The Once-ler was the big business and the Lorax was the EPA. The Once-ler looked at him as a nuisance and wouldn’t hear him out in anything. All the Lorax was trying to do was prevent what the world was going to end up to be. Which is what we all have to do. You have to learn from history so that history doesn’t repeat itself. We should all learn from the story of the Once-ler. So that this can be prevented in the world because the more you destroy the ecosystem with pollution and cutting down trees, the less oxygen we will have and more and more animals will start to die off.

The Earth isn’t just a place for us to live it’s our home, we have to care enough to make the change not just hope it happens. “It’s not what it is, it’s about what it can become ” (70) What this means is that we can’t look at the world as just a place to live and then not worry about anything else. We have to look at it as what it can become. This is because it already is one way but we have to find ways to make it better. Everything we do effects us in some way, the more we protect are environment the better it will be and the healthier of a world we will get to live in. So look at it as what it can become not as what it already is and then maybe we can keep the story of the Once-ler on paper and not in real life.

CONNECTIONS

Author's Note: In this essay I tried to explain why the people you think can help you sometimes always can't. Also I was trying to work on my goals of transitioning between paragraphs and developing different sentence begins.   

“I know all those astronomers I’d watched an hour earlier on CNN can explain just what happened and how and why and they’ll be explaining on CNN tonight and tomorrow and I guess until the next big story happens. I know I can’t explain, because I don’t really know why.”[…] “But the moon wasn’t a half moon anymore. It was tilted and wrong and a three-quarter moon and it got larger, way larger, large like a moon rising on the horizon, only it wasn’t rising. It was smack in the middle of the sky, way too big, way to visible. You could see details on the craters without the binoculars that before I’d only seen with Matt’s telescope.(19)  Some people think they know everything, whereas there are people that know they can’t help you but try anyway. It always seems to turn itself around on you, and the people you relied on the most are useless and the unhelpful people turn out to be the ones that take charge. Sometimes the “helpful” people in the world, like in this case, the astronomers, could not help anything, and the citizens had to live with the moon and try and just figure out what’s going on. Life as we knew it by Susan Beth Pfeffer. To the readers always try to succeed in the things that you do and try to be successful but even though you do have a big scientific job where you think you can help you will never be perfect at it. 

In this book Miranda and her brother live in northern Pennsylvania with their mom and an asteroid hits the moon and brings it a lot closer to Earth. In their little town this was really cool and everyone on their street was out to watch it. When the asteroid hit there were some cheers and then as the moon started approaching earth there were screams and people were running all over the place like chickens with their heads cut off. No one knew what was going on. I feel this way sometimes when I’m given directions and don’t know what I’m doing. When I have to run a machine that could kill someone while were splitting wood I feel a little uneasy. These people were unsure of the unknown and were scared. 

Even though being scared was a big part of this book second guessing yourself was another. Their where people second guessing God because of what was going on, and their own choices because they didn’t know what to do. But the biggest thing was when people in the town started arguing with each other and eventually everyone was second guessing their actions. I have second guessed myself every since I was really little. But what seems to be the biggest thing I’m doing know is second guessing whether my bowling ball will curve or not on the ally. So I swing my arm across my body but the people of this little town had bigger things to worry about.

This was a book that I really had a chance to connect with it was hard at first but as I read deeper into the story I could really understand what was going on. I never could understand why I second guess myself or feel scared when I know I’m doing something right. But in this book it really helped me to understand those things, and it’s all because I want to make sure everything comes out perfect in the end which is never true because nothing and nobody is perfect. Everyone is like that, not only me it is hard to just understand why. But now I know so don’t ever try and make anything perfect because it will never be but you can always try your hardest to succeed the best that you can.