Holiday Celebrations – Jane

My Holiday Celebration

My family and I celebrate Christmas. Every year we have a Christmas tree and lights up outside. This year my mom and I put up multi colored lights across the railings of the steps outside, and light up candy canes on the ground next to it! The Christmas tree has mostly red and gold ball ornaments, but a lot of the special memory ones too. Ever since I’ve remembered, I’ve had a chocolate advent countdown calendar. Every day of december I get a chocolate. The chocolates never taste good (usually stale), but it’s still fun anyways!

Over the winter break I love to go skiing at Catamount. My brother also works at the Catamount Ski School so we go every weekend. Last year, my family rented a house in Great Barrington for a week. Catamount was less than 5 minutes from the house. I had different friends over for the days and we all went skiing. When my friend Anna came over, we also went to the town. We got TONS of candy, so much that later that night I threw up. But the candy shop was awesome there, so can you blame me? We also went to the movies and saw Saving Mr. Banks. It was really awesome.

One of my favorite things to do during this time is watch Christmas movies. Especially Home Alone and Elf. They’re both really funny and cheerful. Ice skating is also another great part of winter. I definitely love playing in the snow with my dog. He’s white so he blends in with the snow and it’s hard to find him most of the time. Anyway, my family always goes to church on Christmas. It’s nice to sing all those Christmas carols. And over the winter break I have a lot of fun. Doing all the seasonal activities is the best part. I look forward to Christmas all year! It’s such a happy time filled with love and joy.

cutexmastree.gif Blinking Christmas Tree by Natalia-Factory

Week #4 Activity #3 by Jane

Week #4 Activity #3

In Activity #3, if you use google chrome as a browser, you can download a google extension called Ghostery. Next, you go onto five of your favorite websites. Ghostery is an extension that tells you what companies are tracking you from the website your on. Here is my opinion on what I found:

My five favorite websites all had companies that were tracking me on them. It was very surprising to see that these websites I thought were safe, weren’t really. I noticed that the companies that weren’t tracking me were Apple, Wikipedia, Google, etc. These also seem like safe places so it wasn’t very shocking that no company was tracking me.  I blocked all of those companies that were tracking me, but it definitely made me think twice about what websites I go on. And I’m definitely keeping Ghostery!

My Data:

Websites

Amount Of Trackers

Manga High

4 trackers

Netflix

8 trackers

Pusheen The Cat

6 trackers

Prezi

10 trackers

Pandora

7 trackers

Heroes in One for the Murphys -Jane

Who do think are the heroes so far in One For The Murphy’s and why?

I think Mrs. Murphy is a hero because she took Carley into her home even when she had three kids already. She also has a good heart and doesn’t lose patience with her. Mrs. Murphy never gives up on Carley even when she is a handful. Even though it may not seem like it, Carley is a hero as well. She helped get Michael Eric to the hospital when he was having a seizure by calling 911 and answering their questions about the situation. She was very nice to him afterwards when she gave him Mr. Longneck. Even small things like that, can make a difference.

Challenge #2 Activity #13 -Jane

Challenge #2 Activity 13

I chose Activity 13 in Challenge 2. For the activity, I had to write the word thirteen in 13 different languages. I already knew how to say thirteen in Spanish and French, but I still had 11 more languages to go. So that definitely required research. I do admit, I tried Google translate. But I’ve been told it’s not very good and winds up with a not so bad, but not so good outcome. Instead, I went on my dashboard on my computer and looked a program that’s called Translation. I ended up using that for the rest of my list.

 

  1. Spanish- trece

  2. French- treize

  3. Finnish- kolmetoista

  4. Dutch- dertien

  5. Greek- dekatría

  6. Russian- trinadtsat’

  7. Irish- trí déag

  8. Welsh- tri ar ddeg

  9. Turkish- onüç

  10. Danish- tretten

  11. Italian- tredici

  12. Polish- trzynaście

  13. Portuguese- treze

Time For A Break – by Jane

Week #3

For the Time For A Break challenge, I played a few games. While I was looking through the different games to play and write about, I saw a game that seemed interesting in the list under Art. It’s a game where you make things with colored sand. It reminded me of a game that I love to play called Sandbox. The sand game I played for the challenge was called This Is Sand. One of the differences between Sandbox and This Is Sand is that in Sandbox you also build with different elements, objects, etc and not just sand. Here is a screenshot of what I created in This Is Sand:

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After I was done playing that, I looked for other games in the art section. I found one that was called Getty Games. When I opened it up, there were different art game options to choose from. I automatically clicked on ‘Match Madness’ because I know I’m good at matching games.

 

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The last game I played was called Refugees In Sudan. It was under the Simulation Games category. My eyes were drawn to it because when I did Montessori Model UN last April, my country was South Sudan. At the start of the game, you pick who you would like to play as. Then you forge for water to bring to your camp and hide from danger. It took a few tries to fully get it, but after a few minutes the goal was accomplished and I brought back water to my family!

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Challenge #1 Activity 4 -Jane

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Challenge #1

I made my avatar with a website called moeruavatar.com/index_en.shtml. It was really cool to design it because I got to look at all the different hairstyles, clothing and make it my own color. My favorite part of designing it was definitely picking the position of the avatar. It’s my favorite because there was so many options to choose from!

Summer -By Jane

This August I went on a plane to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. We visited my aunt that lives in Miami and she drove us to the port where the cruise ship “The Allure Of The Seas” with my Mom, Brother, and our friend Kristin. We boarded on the ship and it was super big! The ocean water was this beautiful turquoise water, so it was super awesome to look over and see the sea, (hoping to not fall overboard!). It’s supposed to be the biggest cruise ship in the world! There was 6,000 people on the boat! On it, there was a lot of fun things to do. There was exciting things like ziplining, iceskating, a carousel, and there was these ride-type things called Flo Rider. One of them was a boogie boarding one and the other was a surfing one. Basically there was jets shooting water at you and you were on these boards either boogie boarding or surfing. There was many pools and games on the pool deck, there was also a boardwalk that had a bunch of stores! One of the decks had something called Royal Promenade on it. There was stores, places to eat and a lot of parties and events were held there. We had dinner every night in different restaurants on the ship. The food was delicious!  All of us were on the ship for seven days so there was so much more things to do.

Our first stop, was a private island that the cruise line Royal Caribbean owned. Allure Of The Seas is a Royal Caribbean ship. My aunt works for Royal Caribbean. The island was in Haiti, and it’s called Labadee. We went on water slides, and to a water park there. The water was so warm! After that, we went to Ocho Rios, Jamaica. We were on a bus to take us to a beach, and the whole idea of that seemed awesome to us..until we found out that the bus ride was 2 hours there and two hours back! On the bus ride, I was looking out the window part of the time and from what I saw, that part of Jamaica was pretty poor.

The water was even clearer and warmer than in Haiti! Our last stop was Cozumel, Mexico. There, we went snorkling. There was lots of extraordinary fish, and it was so colorful! We even saw a big shipwreck! It was such an amazing experience!

All the seven days I was there, I never wanted to leave! On the last day, we arrived back in Florida. We all packed our things and boarded off the ship, and went to my Aunts house. She drove us to the airport and we got on the plane back to New York. I’ll never forget how much fun I had!

Scary Story by Jane

The Mysterious Shadow

It was a gloomy autumn evening, and Beatrice was walking home from school. It was just past 7:30 pm, and getting dark. She had stayed late for her friends soccer game, and her parents were working late so they couldn’t pick her up from the school. While Beatrice was walking, she felt like she was being followed. Suspicious, she turns around..but nobody was there. So she carried on with her walk. Still, she felt the presence of someone behind her, watching her every move.

Luckily, Beatrice’s house was right there. She quickly ran up the steps and rang the doorbell. No answer, so Beatrice tried knocking. But not a soul even noticed. She soon realized that no cars, people, or really anything was outside. The streets were empty. It was completely silent. This made her want to crawl into a corner and hide, but just then she remembered the spare key under the door mat. She unlocked the door and darted in her house, relieved.

Beatrice locked the door and sat on the couch.Then the lights flickered, and all power was lost. She looked out the window to see if there was some kind of storm, but there wasn’t even a sign of one. Then she noticed a strange figure in her front yard and gasped, closed the blinds, then called her mom. She still had one bar of service left. It rang for a second, but the line went dead. Beatrice started to feel the air getting thicker and soon it was hard for her to breathe. She decided to stay calm. “This is just a dream,” she said. Suddenly, she heard her lock being picked then the door slowly creaked open, Beatrice heard footsteps coming closer and closer to her. A loud shriek spread across the whole town, and that was the last of Beatrice.