My Year 8 English Experience

Class film- Fly Away Home 

When did her journey start: when she goes to Canada or when she finds the eggs?

These were two special events for Amy in the film Fly Away Home. However, the question is “When did she actually start her journey: When she went to Canada or when she found the eggs.” Well I don’t think that her story started at any of these events. I believe that her journey started when she met her father in hospital for the first time in years.

Of course, it would take some getting used to before Amy could comfortably socialise with her father. Remember, she had only just met her father after years of spending time with her mother, who had sadly died in a car crash. Her mother’s death, as well as everything being so different in Canada, had affected Amy’s emotions, causing her to rudely react to her father.

But when Amy found some geese eggs that had been abandoned by their mother, it revealed that she had a soft heart. She took the eggs and cared for them, until they hatched.

As the geese grew, Amy realsed that they needed to fly south to avoid the harsh, winter conditions that approached. They needed to get to a suitable climate where they could live and find food. This is where Amy began her quest to fly the geese home.

Amy and her father started to work together, both having a similar goal in common (to fly the geese home). They found a use for her father’s flying machine that he built. During this time, Amy learnt new things such as how to fly the flying machine. Together, Amy and her father worked hard, boosting the relationship between them and increasing trust for each other. They worked together until the day came when they were ready to fly the geese home.

This was a big challenge for Amy, but her father helped her along the way and supported her through it. Amy gained more persistance and trust for her father, and I think that their relationship would just keep getting better afterwards.

The title says it all. Why do we have to take our school holidays early just because the Commonwealth Games is on? To sit around all day and watch sport? But what if you don’t want to watch sport? If they have school holidays for this event, why don’t they have them for events such as music and art? For example, when an art festival is on! There are no school holidays for this event. If we have early holidays to watch other people play sport on television, why aren’t the school holidays early for an art festival so people can go and look at the artwork?
“What’s so bad about the holidays being put forward for the Commonwealth Games?” You ask. Well, I have a list of reasons right here!
Bad things:

• Because the term is so short, all the teachers give us a whole lot of tests to do before the end of the term. This means more homework and less time to enjoy your own stuff. Right now I’m finding that I’m getting a lot of homework and lots of tests.
• Because the school holidays are so early, it means that we’ll have a really long term next term. School, school and more school! It will just keep on going and going without any holidays!
• It feels that we don’t need another holiday just yet. We’ve just had 6 weeks off school!

I think that this isn’t right. What do you think?

Honestly, 8Alive wasn’t as fun as I expected. One of the first activities I did with my class was about healthy eating. The task was to create a brochure to proove that you knew how to stay healthy. We found the information on the internet. This activity used up two lessons, and the teachers made an excuse that we had to make it because we were going to be using it in a Health and P.E class. While making the brochure, I kept looking at my watch. Time seemed like it was going so slow. “Hurry up, I want the bell to go!” I thought. However, doing this activity taught me a lot about what foods are healthy and the types of food to eat most.

Another thing we did in 8Alive was work on our journals. We decorated the covers, and then wrote about the things we did inside. This was quite fun. It took up a lot of the week though. Then we got a square piece of cloth and we got the chance to show off out creative art skills by decorating it. When everyone had finished this, each cloth was going to get sewen together to make a big shield to represent our class.

One of the other activities was called ‘power girl’. Power girl was an imaginary  girl with lots of good personality qualities. The lesson that I did was all about girls. The teacher spread out a whole heap of girl stuff  such as fake phones and make up on the floor. Each member of the class picked an object and then explained what it has to do with girls. Then we acted out these barbie dolls in a situation where one of them was being excluded. I didn’t really enjoy the ‘Power Girl’ lesson much.

Now for the best activity of the week. Victorian Market! This was an excursian. We got into groups of four, and were told an item to find and buy in the market. Also, we had to fill out a sheet with questions on it. My group had to buy some felt-tip pens. Strangely, they were very hard to find. We spent the day looking around the huge market for stuff that we liked. I bought a cute, stuffed penguin toy for my bother, as he loves penguins and a silver key ring with a Z on it for me! Then, we went over to the bag section, as I needed a new bag to go shopping with. I spotted a silver bag that I wanted to buy which cost $20.00. It had lots of different compartments, and the others said that it looked good on me. I spent ages looking at the other bags and then came back and decided to buy the silver one. I took out my wallet to buy it, and then found out that I was $5.00 short! This really disappointed me, as it was a great bag. It was light and soft and a really nice colour. I asked the owner if I could have it for $15.00, but he said no. I decided that I’d have to come down to the market on the holidays and buy it. Well, it was lunch time and I bought some hot chips and juice. The others ate Mc Donalds, but I didn’t want that kind of food. One of the members got separated from the rest of the group in the food court, however, we found them soon afterwards. We went through the cheese and meat section looking for the answers to the questions on our sheet. It stunk, so we tried not to stay long in it. We got the answers and managed to find some felt-tip pens just before we had to leave. This had been a great day, and I would like to go back to the Victorian Market as they had so many great stuff I wanted to buy.

The 8Alive program runs all year at different times, so hopefully some of the in-school activities will get better. Anyway, the good thing about 8Alive in school is that we don’t get any homework out of it!!!