This intensive I’m in the instrumental music intensive. I’m excited because I’m doing a piano duet with Colette playing the song Canon in D minor. I’ve never done a piano duet, so I’m excited how it’s going to sound when we finish the piece. Other groups are choosing a song and many people playing different instruments or singing. Last year I did that, but this time I want to try something different. At the end of the intensive which is in around four weeks, we will perform for each other. I’m looking forward to hearing everyone else’s songs they’ve worked on, and I’m also looking forward to playing our piece too.

Last week I went to Canada with my french class. My favorite activity we did there was snow tubing at a snow tubing resort. There was one ride called mount everest that was the highest slide that we all wanted to try. Sharyn didn’t want us going on it at first since she thought it was dangerous, but we ended up going on it. And after riding it, it ended up being my favorite slide in the resort. We walked up four flights of stairs to get to the top of the slide, then we put our tubes on the slide, and when we were ready the man working at the slide would press a button that made the metal blocker go and we started going down a super steep slide that then turned into a snow slide. It was so steep that we had to go with two or more people or else you could get air and not be on the slide. After we went snow tubing, we ate maple taffy again since they sold it there. Snow tubing was really fun and I hope to do it again sometime.

This Thursday my french class is going to Montreal for a week. I’m really excited because I’ve never been to Canada before and I’m looking forward to the activities we are going to do. One thing I’m looking forward to is tubing, and I’m also looking forward to seeing the chutes de montmorency waterfall. One thing that helps is that there isn’t a time difference from New York and Canada so we wont be jet lagged and wont have to get used to it. I’m also excited to try the food there and have a cooking class with a chef. I hope we will have a lot of fun there.

In art class we were able to choose a style of art we wanted to focus on that no one else had to do. I chose to make an acrylic painting of a photo of a tree I took. When I took the photo I took it in the angle of looking up, so I had to make the painting in a different angle. I learned how different the color tones in the painting have to be because sometimes there’s more light shining on some of the leaves, so I had to make them a lighter green. But also I had to learn how to make texture for the tree trunk which I’m still working on. With acrylic paint you are also able to give the painting a little texture by making the paint thick when you dab on the painting. I’ve never used acrylic paints before, but now I know that they’re really fun to use and that you can do a lot of cool paintings with it.

Last week my advisory went to visit the high school to see what it was like since we’ll be in high school very soon. We sat in on four classes, and the teachers there made us sit away from our friends so we felt like we were in the class. Some of the classes were really interesting, but some were hard to understand. There was a lot more independence in high school because you had a lot more classes with different people. I learned that a big difference about the high school is that you have the same advisor for 4 years, instead of switching each year. Even though the middle school is a lot different than the high school, I’m excited for next year.

Last week we had a quiz about linear functions. Normally we take this quiz by ourselves, but this time we had to do it with a partner. We had to share the same paper, so our grades would both be the same for that quiz. It was a bit challenging because sometimes your partner wouldn’t agree with what you wanted to say, so it put some pressure thinking about which was right or not. Also if one person did something and got something wrong, then you would get that grade too. I would maybe like to do something like this in the future, but I also like to do quizzes on my own too.

A few days ago we got our teacher comments about how we did this trimester. It helped me learn about what I should focus on more, and the things that I have improved on. Now I am able to make some new goals for the second trimester based on what the teachers wrote about to improve on. By reading what the teachers wrote, next trimester it will help us write our own comments. By reading these comments I hope that I will be better in the second trimester.

For the past week we have started a unit on chemistry. I’m really excited to learn about chemistry since you get to try a lot of experiments and see what happens when you mix different things together. Last week we did a lab called the Rainbow Lab. We had six different test tubes, and poured red, yellow, and blue into them. Then we followed instructions and mixed the different colors in different test tubes and the end result was a rainbow. The first test tube was red, then the next was orange, then yellow, then green, then blue, and purple.

On the second week of winter break I went to San Jose to visit my friend who lives there. It was really fun and I got to learn a lot new things there. She taught me how to use a skateboard type thing, I tried a lot of new foods, and watched a lot of movies. Since she lives in California I don’t get to see her a lot, so when we got to see each other it was really exciting. I also took a day trip to San Francisco and got to see the Golden Gate Bridge, we went to three different stops to look at the bridge and each view was really cool. I was only there for 3 days, but I had a really fun time.