Malibu

Crisp, salty, fresh air blew through my hair as the boat made its way through the Princess Louisa Inlet. AFTER 15 HOURS OF TRAVELLING—TEN HOURS OF DRIVING, TWO HOURS OF FERRIES, AND THREE HOURS OF BEING ON A BOAT—WE HAD MADE IT. WHILE the Princess (name of the boat) was pulling up to the dock all I remember is a bunch of overly happy people screaming and jumping up and down. I thought we were going to a crazy island. I soon realized they were welcoming us. UNTIL that point I had been a little nervous of what to expect of my upcoming week, but once I realized how happy these strangers were to meet us, I knew that this was about to be the best week of my life.  

WHEN I had signed up to go to YoungLife’s camp called “Malibu”, I had no idea what to expect. I didn’t even know what YoungLife was! For some reason though, I had felt compelled to sign up for it. It was probably my teacher who had advertised it to us. She was a teacher that I absolutely adored, WHO also happened to be involved in YoungLife, thus I followed in her lead and somehow ended up in Malibu, Canada the summer going into my junior year in high school.

BEFORE arriving at Malibu (or seeing it) I had no idea what to expect. BECAUSE this was my first time really being away from home I was nervous. But upon catching my first glimpse of Malibu, I was in love. It was absolutely the most breathtaking place I had ever been to. Just the fact that it’s nestled in an inlet gives you a little idea of how beautiful it is. But add the mountains and towering trees that surround it and it’s nothing like you can imagine. Everywhere I looked I was amazed.

AS the week went on I soon realized that not only my surroundings were amazing, but absolutely everything about Malibu was amazing: MALIBU WAS LITERALLY HOME AWAY FROM HOME. From the zip-line and Frisbee golf course, to the battle-tubing and bead-making; Malibu had everything a kid could dream of.

There was one word that popped into my mind with pretty much everything that I experienced during my week at Malibu: incredible. Signing up to go to Malibu was the best decision I have ever made; especially since it was such an impulse decision. IF you ever get the opportunity to go to a place called Malibu, located up in Canada, I highly encourage you to take that opportunity and experience the best place on this earth. ALTHOUGH I have not been back to Malibu since that summer going into my junior year, my mind (AND HEART) often wander back to that breath-taking place, filled with life-changing memories that will be with me forever.  

Blog #4

FANBOYS. I feel like I heard that acronym all throughout high school, AND it meant nothing. YET, (does that work? I put a comma after the coordinating conjunction instead of before…hmm…) something about it obviously stuck with me because I seem to understand it pretty well. OR so I think.

This past week was a blast for me. I absolutely loved making the sentences on the magnet board and having the challenge of only using a few select words; I think that made it a lot more unique and fun for us to be creative…some of us got very creative, ha ha. The activity really helped me to grasp the difference between intransitive, transitive, and linking verb sentences. WHILE IDENTIFYING NOUNS,VERBS, AND ADJECTIVES COMES EASY FOR ME, IDENTIFYING THESE S-VI, S-V-O, AND S-LV-SC SENTENCES DOES NOT COME AS EASY. BUT that is why we are practicing them, right? J

WHEN WE WENT OVER THE SENTENCES WE CREATED ON THURSDAY, I SURE GOT A GOOD LAUGH FROM A FEW OF THEM. Being able to not only create our own S-Vi, S-V-O, and S-LV-SC sentences, but see other peoples sentences also, was nice to get a more broad understanding of the different ways they are. FOR as many of the sentences that we made, we all better be pro at identifying them now.

BEFORE I BEGAN THIS CLASS I THOUGHT I WAS PRETTY GOOD AT GRAMMAR; I have realized I have a lot to master before I should be allowed to teach a class. Something I have come to realize about myself though is that I may be able to write perfect grammar (eventually), but when it comes to speaking perfect grammar…that is a completely different story. When I speak I feel like I sometimes become dyslexic with my words or I just forget about using correct English and result in talking in slang. Oops. Depending on the situation I am I try to use correct English when speaking but that may not always work if I get too caught up in something, SO my future students better just ignore how I talk at times…

Overall, this week was a fun week of learning for me. I guess not so much learning, as reviewing, but still…I feel as if I accomplished something, made some new friends, realized how many classes I have with mostly the same people (which is awesome, let’s get some study groups going, eh?), and had fun learning all in one. I’d say that is a solid week. Although I do not enjoy math, NOR science in the least little bit, I absolutely love English for some reason and feel like I am doing something right with my life. That is a great feeling. Oh, P.S…we are one-third of the way through the semester!!!

Blog #3

“Alyssa Writes her Blog”, if this were the title of an article ‘Alyssa’ would be the subject, ‘writes’ would be the verb, and ‘blog’ would be the object…meaning this title is a SVO, or subject-verb-direct object. When going through the newspapers this week and identifying whether different titles of articles were just subject-verb or subject-verb-direct object, I learned that sometimes you have to assume they left out a certain word, that could be the subject or something. For instance, I remember one of the article titles looked as if it had no subject, but by adding one word into the title all of a sudden there was a subject, you just sometimes have to assume who the author is directing the subject to, if it is not given.

Prepositional phrases are also starting to stick out to me more easily now. I remember learning prepositions and how my teacher helped us to learn them was by thinking about a box: If an object could be under, below, within, above, inside, or whatever about the box, then it was a preposition. I hated prepositions and I had no idea what my teacher was trying to teach me with this whole box thing back then. But now, after we have been going over all these article titles this past week I was able to identify prepositions and prepositional phrases so much easier than ever before. It was great!

What I’ve really been enjoying about our grammar class is how we are so interactive. I hate sitting in a class and being talked at…lectures literally kill me. But with our class, I love how Barbara will explain a little, but then she will just throw us right into practicing what we are discussing for the day. That is so much more helpful rather than just reading from a book what something is, at least for me.

It’s kind of like what the teacher in Dora did. She would let the kids work on their assignment with each other, trying to figure stuff out and what not, and then they would discuss their assignment and why they did certain things they did, like placing a period in a certain place. For us, we work together as tables to figure out different grammatical things in the newspaper articles and then go over it as a class and are able to see/hear other people’s perspectives on what they found, because they may have found something that another group may have not. I do enjoy working by MYSELF, but I really enjoying working with others and being able to get another’s opinion or perspective on something that I may not be sure about.

BETWEEN YOU AND ME, I may think that I am good at grammar, but being in this class for the past few weeks has made me realize I have a lot more to learn/master.

Blog #2

It is crazy for me to think that we are already going into the fourth week of school…time flies when you’re having fun, right? Looking at what we have been learning about so far in our grammar class I feel like everything is more a review for me, which is a good thing because that means all my past teachers were obviously doing their job. But having all this review is nice because it is not only refreshing my knowledge on punctuation, but it is also expanding my knowledge on it because I am now gaining other perspectives of how punctuation can be used and still be correct.

For instance, I never actually knew if a comma was supposed to come after an ‘and’ when listing things, but now I realize that it honestly does not make a difference. So now, I feel like I need to just decide whether I want to use a comma or not in those cases so then my writing is consistent.

I also have enjoyed working with classmates on assignments and being able to hear their perspectives on where they think certain punctuation should go, or whatever. THEIRS may be different than mine, but in the end both our ways of punctuating could work.

IN MIDDLE SCHOOL, I remember writing a lot of poetry so I had to learn how to punctuate that; IN HIGH SCHOOL, we stuck to essays and I soon figured out that poetry and essays are punctuated in different ways. But in both middle and high school I remember working a lot with my teacher whenever I did not understand something, or even just trying to figure it out myself…I just hated doing stuff wrong, including punctuation in my school papers.

WHOSE job is it anyway to make sure kids are learning grammar properly? Well, teachers obviously. But I also believe it is the child’s responsibility. After reading the Dora story I believe that the way a teacher teaches their students highly affects the outcome of whether or not a student is going to enjoy learning, or not, and thus whether a student will actually gain knowledge on something, or not. ITS outcome is all based on the teacher. Teachers have such a huge influence in their students’ lives and whether they grow up enjoying school or not. That is the reason why I want to become a teacher. I had a few teachers all throughout my schooling career that really made me love school. But there was one teacher in high school that really changed my life and made me want to become a teacher just so I can make a difference in other kids lives’, like she did in mine. I am going to make sure I use the fun and accurate ways of teaching, whatever that may mean for me.

When it comes to teaching styles, it’s YOURS that I enjoy Barbara. J