This year at Ashokan I wasn’t homesick. I usually get very homesick on these kinds of trips and it ruins all the fun for me, but this year was different. If I started to feel homesick I pushed through and didn’t think about it. On the first night I was walking back from the camp fire, and all of a sudden it felt like a huge wave of homesickness washed over my head, and I couldn’t think about anything except for how much I missed my dog and my sister and my parents. I started to tear up, until I realized that crying and being homesick wouldn’t let me see my parents any sooner, so I took a deep breath, and thought “If I go to sleep tonight, I will be one day closer to seeing my parents. Then, if I go to sleep tomorrow night that day I will be able to hug my dog.” I pushed those sad homesick thoughts out of my head and focused on hanging out with my friends and having a good time, so when I got home I could tell stories of how much fun I had. After this experience I know that I am strong enough to push through when I start to feel really homesick so I can enjoy myself. I know that from now on, when I go on overnight trips and I start to see that wave coming towards me, I can stop it.

Hello again. In art class for the past week and a half we have been doing single point perspective drawings on a city block we made up in our heads. This has been a challenge for me because every line you draw has to go to the vanishing point and then you must erase the vanishing lines and it takes a lot of concentration and you have to make sure that the perspective is correct. The hardest part for me is making sure everything looks like it would if you looked down a city block and making sure everything is pointing directly to the vanishing point. I think that my drawing looks pretty good so far

https://drive.google.com/a/lrei.org/file/d/0B1Oeo0oBM0VjTlF1TFRyWEpaZm8/view

I am very happy with it because I think that I have added a lot of detail even though it is a made up street and I hope to add more detail as our work on this goes on.  I think that the hardest part from transitioning from perspective letter drawing to this is that now you are layering on things like buildings and awnings when before it was just a simple shape with nothing on top of it.

In this article an Indian Entrepreneur named Narayana Peesapaty talks about his genius idea of making edible utensils! He makes flavored spoons, forks, knifes you name it! He invented this because in India 120 billion pieces of disposable plastic cutlery are discarded each year. I think that this article relates to there’s no such place as away, because he invented these utensils because so many plastic utensils were getting thrown away because except for eating they have no use. I think this is an example of humans following the rules because they are trying to reduce the amount of plastic waste that could eventually end up in landfills. I think that one suggestion for the future could be trying to make edible plates, bowls and cups.

Do you ever wonder how humans get enough Oxygen to survive? Or where all that Carbon Dioxide goes after you breath it out? Well, I have an answer for you.

Everything is connected to everything else. Just like We breath in the Oxygen that plants produce and the plants take in the Carbon Dioxide that We produce from that Oxygen. That goes for animals as well. We provide food for animals and they provide food for us. Even if that is milk and eggs or beef and pork.

Just to put this in prospective, if all the plants on earth died all of a sudden, we might be okay for just a few more minutes but once all the oxygen on earth was breathed in and there was only carbon dioxide, we could only survive 3 minutes.

So to make sure that everything on earth can survive, there has to be a balance. If there are too many people on earth, there will not be enough plants providing Oxygen for us to breath in. If there are too many plants and not enough people or animals, the plants will not have the amount of carbon dioxide they need to survive. Those are just a few ways everything is connected.

Here is a little extra math problem if you’d like. If 2 trees provide enough oxygen for one person, than how many trees would it take to give the 7.5 billion people on earth oxygen?

Hello World!

As most of you know the Presidential election is happening right now and the New York primary was yesterday Tuesday, April 19. This year the election was so interesting that the 5th grade decided to go around the neighborhood asking people who had voted which candidate they had chosen to vote for. We had a bunch of sheets on a clipboard and a pencil. Then, we were split into groups. My group stationed ourselves a few feet away from a church’s basement where people were voting.

This is the church that we exit polled at.

Some of the questions on the sheet consisted of:

Which candidate did you vote for?

What is your gender?

How old are you?

What was the most important issue for you when choosing a presidential candidate?

How happy are you with the choices for President in your party this year?

We stood at the entrance to the church basement for and hour and 15 minutes and when people came out of the church, we asked them those six questions. Most of the people were nice and were glad to tell us about their choice, but there were a few who kept it very secretive. I mean, I do understand why some people would do that, but it wasn’t very helpful when they only gave us have the information. In the end, Hillary Clinton got a lot of votes from women and Bernie Sanders got a lot of votes from people under the age of 25-30. John Kasich was the most popular in the most popular in Greenwich Village but Donald Trump And Ted Cruz still got a few votes each. Overall, I think that the polling was fun and helped me learn a lot about how primaries work and how well the candidates were doing.

Hello World! This quarter we had reading partners and we got to pick a book to read. We had to make assignments and how many chapters we had to read by the next class. We wrote a reflection on this and here’s mine:

My partner and I read Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. Our partnership was really good because my partner and I read at about the same speed. And we have sort of the same taste in books so we agreed very easily on things like picking assignments and how many chapters we were going to read. I’m proud that I chose books that I wouldn’t have picked on a regular basis, and I think this has helped me become a better reader. One challenge for me was not reading ahead. This has been a challenge because I really love reading books and both the books we have read are page-turners so not going ahead was a little difficult.

By: Stella Story

Hello World. Today we will talk about gun violence and gun safety.

OK, so first of all, I don’t think all guns should be banned, because some people don’t use guns in a bad way. They use it to protect themselves just in case someone tries to attack them. These people are back round checked and and they purchase the gun legally. But, other people are back round checked and they purchase the gun legally, but they use the gun for the wrong reasons like, shooting innocent people or killing themselves. On the other hand, if all guns were banned there would be no shootings to make people want to protect themselves. I think President Obama has made a good choice in increasing back round checks and making sure absolutely everyone gets one.

I think there are more ways to stop gun violence or at least make the problem better. Here are some of the ways we could do that. After someone has purchased a gun, they have to take a gun handling course to make sure they can handle a gun correctly and keep themselves and other people safe. One other way we could help is by banning certain kinds of guns that are especially violent and are made only for the army and things like that. I hope that gun violence is not a problem we will see for much longer because even though people have a right to have guns, they shouldn’t use them in bad ways.