Kayla’s Blog

Seventh grade has given me so many memories, more than I can even list. But there are three that stand out above all the others, that I will remember for year. The first memorable moment that came to mind was at the first school volleyball game. Me and calla were on the same team and on the last game we had a by, so our coach said we could go home as long as our parents were there. Me and calla wanted something from the snack bar, but we didn’t have any money. However Calla lives right around the corner so we ran as fast as we could to her house and back. But one the way back we stop cause we were crossing the street and there was a car coming. And as the car drove by I noticed that it was my mom. So we ran even faster. And without being said we got our food, and when my mom came to pick me up she thought that I had ditched the whole game. Another memory that stands out is on a Friday at lunch me and my friend were board so we went over to get a game. We ended up picking giant uno. The card were bigger then our heads but it was so fun and I ended up wining. And I felt like it was more fun the regular uno. The last memory that I’m going to share is on Thursday me and my friends decided to bring ingredients to make edible cookie dough. We softened the butter in the sun, and it turned out really good. It was probably the best edible cookie dough I’ve ever had and thanks to Kendra we had extra chocolate chips just for eating. I’m really sad that seventh grade is over and I’m really going to miss it. But I’m excited for eighth grade. Thanks for listening.

This week I completed my trifold and practiced my speech to a point where I could almost remember the entire thing. My trifold turn out really nice and I was very proud with how I was displaying what I learned. I glued a blue boarder all the way around the outside. Then I went to the store and bought some letter stickers to put on. I wrote “ASL” in big gold letters and “American Sign Language” I tinier black letters right under it, just in case they did know what it stood for. Then I printed out 4 photos to go on the board and put them on black card stock so it stood out on the white. This week I didn’t really have any struggles because my goal was pretty easy. And usually this part of the project is fun get to see everything coming together. I also didn’t make any adjustments since this is the final week of the project, and where we complete our final goal. So if I had made any adjustments I would be changing my entire plan. But I did have to adjust my speech because I had to add my goal and all the week 5 details to it. Since this is the end of our project I don’t have a goal for next week except to hopefully do good on my presentation in front of the whole class. But I am so happy that I got to learn the basics of sign language and I really hope I get to use it in my future someday.

After looking and evaluating the image above I realized how much money and wealth can affect people. As you can see the caption reads “Happiness and satisfaction in life depends on how much is considered enough.” To me this quote means that when you are spoiled and everything is just handed to you, you become less grateful. The picture on the left is a child that has piles and piles of toys. But he’s probably crying because he wants more. However the image on the right reveals a kid that looks poorer yet happier. He is playing with a wooden toy car and has a humongous smile on his face. This proves to me that he is more grateful that he has one toy while the other kid doesn’t care about what he does have, just what he doesn’t. Personally I think that no matter the amount of money kids should not be spoiled, because this raises them to not learn how to do things by themselves or be grateful. They just expect their parent to hand them everything. Thank you for reading my blog and i hope that you somewhat agree with me.

For this week my goal was to start learning some signs to put in my speech and to finish my speech. Even though this sounds like something easy to do, it’s is quite difficult. Just like I stated in my speech, ASL doesn’t have words like: is, do, the, and, by. Words like this just simply don’t have a sign, so you exclude them from your sentence. Besides the things I struggle with, one thing that I think was accomplished was adding more to the speech. Surprisingly when writing the second half words were just flowing from my mouth and on to my iPad. This gave me more time to find signs to put in my speech. One adjustment I made to my goals was to work a home a lot more. I feel like we just started this project and our big presentation is a week away, so I think I’m going to have to work more at home then I do usually. That way I have next week to design my trifold. Now that I have completed my speech, next week I will continue to find signs to put in my speech and, I will start finding photos.

During the month of April I read a book called My Life With The Walter Boys. This book was written by Ali Novak and is a realistic fiction story about a girl named Jackie. Jackie is from New York, her parents are very wealthy, and busy, her sister is her role model and one of her best friends. When Jackie is six-teen her entire family dies in a tragic accident, causing her to move in with the Walter family. This family is very different than anything that Jackie is used to, they live on a farm in Colorado, hangout a lot together, go to public school, and have twelve sons. In the beginning moving in with this family is hard because she is still grieving over the death of her loved ones and because she doesn’t know how to fit in with the family yet. Jackie try’s to focus on her grades and making her family proud. But being surrounded by all of these so called “Greek-god-level hot boy” gets in the way, and her focuses change.

My Life With The Walter Boys Is now my favorite book that I’ve ever read. Usually I don’t want to read, but while reading this book you could not get me to stop. I enjoyed it so much and I wish there was a second one because the plot line was so good and it was left off with unfinished details. I loved this book so much because there was never a dull moment for Jackie. Something was always going on no matter if it was good or bad. At parts I felt bad for her because she was in the middle of so many problems, but at the same time I wish that I was her. This book will probably be one that I read over and over again.

My favorite character was Nathen for so many reasons, but for the most part just for being loyal to Jackie, and loving her like she was one of his siblings. Nathen was Jackie’s best friend in the family, he loved to play music and run with Jackie in the morning. Not only that but he also was always right by her side at all the right moments, and he alway help her work through her problems. One of my favorite quote that he said was on page 234. “‘ I’m not an idiot, jackie,’ he said, his voice edged with amusement. ‘I know both of my brothers well enough to have to put two and two together, when I heard the stories you did absolutely nothing wrong.’” This is my favorite quote because it shows just how much he cares about her and that he’s trying to make her feel better.

My favorite quote was on page 354. “‘Katherine, this—this is the best surprise anyone has given to me,’ I said, barely able to get my words out. My hands were trembling as I pulled her into a hug. There was nothing I could say to truly show her what this –– having a family again — meant to me.” This quote warmed my heart because it just shows how important Katherine has become to Jackie and how much Katherine loves Jackie. Because even though Katherine will never replace her mom she want Jackie to know that she is apart of the family and has made a positive impact on them.

The guest bedroom in my grandma and grandpa’s house is my favorite room to be in. Even though this room is not located in my house it will forever be my favorite. This room is now the guest bedroom but before, when she lived there, it was my moms room. I love it for many reasons but first you’re going to have to picture the room. Once you get to the top of the big staircase there is a room in the corner with a white door and a gold handle. Is a fairly big sized room with light, light blue walls. On that same wall there’s a big closet with a sliding white door. Then there’s my favorite part of the room, which is the queen sized bed, smack down in the center of the mirroring wall. The bed has a white frame that has a metal pole arch with metal poles going vertically. The bed is also really tall so I have to jump up of it. Besides just the look the mattress feels like heaven when you lay on it, and whenever I stay there I always get the best night of sleep. The are two sleeping pillows, two big square pillows, two pillows that match the comforter, a few throw pillows, and a throw blanket. This bed is the focal point of this room for a reason. On either side of the bed is a dresser, one that has decor on it a another that has a connecting mirror and vanity drawers. The last this that makes this room amazing is the carpet, which is so soft and fluffy. Now the three things I especially love are, the bed, the color of the walls, and the fluffy carpet. Thanks for reading my blog about my favorite room!

This week my goal was to work on writing my speech. For the most part I completed my speech. However because the projects not over and I’m still going to be learning more things I will have to keep adding to my speech, and fine tuning it. What I struggled on this week was that while we were working on the project I had a hard time focusing because the room was pretty loud. So I had to work on the speech over the weekend and Monday. This week I didn’t make any adjustments but I was having a hard time deciding how to incorporate the basic communication skills I learned. One idea that I came up with was that in the very beginning I would sign, “Hello, and good morning. My name is Kayla, welcome to my presentation.” However I think that I would also need to share some of the other ones that I learned, like thank you, please, and nice to meet you, since these were the things that I learned in the very beginning. Next week my goal is to learn how to sign parts of my speech and I feel like that will be hardest goal I’ve had so far.

This week I realized that while I was making good progress with learning sign language, you need to know basic words to put together complex sentences. So instead of learning two new complex sentences and two new simple sentences I learned 7 more simple communication signs, and I guess you could say this is what I struggled with this week. The signs I learned this week were nice to meet you, please and thank you, welcome, I love you, sorry, no and yes, and finally goodbye. Now that I know how hard it is to sign whole sentences, because not all words have signs, I have changed my goal to being able to sign part of my presentation. However, my next week goal is to write my speech, so that in the weeks to come after that I can learn how to sign some of my presentation. Thank you for reading my blog and I’m so excited to keep learning about ASL.

            

             

            

            

             

            

This week for my 20% project I worked on learning two simple sentences. These sentences were “Happy birthday to you” and “Good morning, Afternoon, or Evening.” While researching I learned that to say somebody’s name you just sign it out using letters. This was very interesting to me because I had always wondered if there was different signs for different names, because some names could be spelled in a different ways. I accomplished memorizing these phrases and being able to sign them on Friday because on my drive to LA I practiced them. One thing I however did struggle with was finding the videos of American Sign Language verses Spanish SL and/or British SL. One adjustment I had to make was that because of this struggle I had to relearn happy birthday because I originally learned it in British sign language. Next week my goal will be to learn two more phrases just like these ones, along with two harder/complex sentences. Thank you for reading my blog and I encourage you to learn how to read sigh language too!

Lauren, Allisson, and Kendra are the three people that I would invite to my dinner. These three people are always hungry so they would love coming to a big feast. Besides the fact that they love eating food, they’re also some of my closest friends. I love hanging out with them at school and at home and so having them over for a fancy dinner would be really fun. All of the time during lunch we have days where either nobody brings food, so we started a thing where we plan a feast every once in a while and we all bring food. All of these feast are very unhealthy and maybe not the best idea but they make us happy, and full, and having those three people over for some real food is something I’ll probably be doing in the future. At my dinner I would serve many items, like chicken parmesan, meet balls, and garlic bread. My grandma makes the best Italian food, so I would also probably ask her to do the cooking. Now that I’ve thought about this dinner I want to have these three people, Allisson Kendra and Lauren, for dinner. Thanks for reading my blog.