The Viola Challenge!

The viola.  An instrument, a tool, and a story.  Each viola is a story of struggles, of people learning, skills being developed, music playing, frustration, and pride.  With each song you master you feel better about yourself and your instrument.  You see the instrument different than those who don't play it, but in ways you can't explain.  At first, you want easy songs, but you want difficult ones quickly, and you learn them faster.

This is more or less what it's like to learn the viola, (or any instrument really, if played long enough.).  I might have it more dramatic, but that's okay!😄  Playing the viola was first, fr me, just some variation.  I played band in the US, so why not do Orchestra here?  The viola was my weapon of choice, because everyone else had chosen either violin or cello, except for me and a double bass player (in my grade).  But over time, I started enjoying playing the viola more than I had enjoyed playing the trombone, for reasons I don't know.

I used to be really bad at playing the viola.  But recently, I've noticed that I've improved at the hard parts in the songs.  For instance, once I was the only viola player in the front two rows, and I usually messed up on the viola solo in the song, but i played it perfectly because there were no others of my clan to cover up my mistakes.  I realized that I could play well if I just tried hard enough and really, actually cared.

Ecological Issues

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ez1k_f9pIIQXKu6z1FvxLaKPVkfZeiz4rR9n1I7SZbw/edit?usp=sharing

For my ecological issue paper, I focused on a small toad living in the Kihansi falls.  This toad is specially adapted to living there with flaps on it's eyes for protection from the spray, and it's extremely small, a grown one about the size of a US penny.  The problem was that it was going extinct thanks to a dam being built nearby the fall, which diverted the water to the hydroelectric dam, so the spray no longer protected them.

I think I could've written more in this paper, and I could've put some images in the text.  Actually, I couldn't put images, because none are CC licensed, but I could've made it a lot more interesting.  I could've put maybe a paragraph describing what life for this toad must have been like, or I could've used better word choice.  I looked back at a research project from last year, and I thought that it was better that this one I made.  I'm not sure if I should be worried, or if that is a good thing.

Book trailers explained

Book trailers are just like movie trailers, and they serve the same purpose: to get you to read the book.  In a movie trailer they show you clips from the movie that give you some information about the movie without spoiling it.  In a book trailer, the people might reenact a part of the book, or give quotes from the book.  In both book trailers and movie trailers, you have to make them seem interesting, so that the person watching wants to read the book or watch the movie.

In my class, we watched a few different kinds of book trailers, and I didn't know which one to do.  I had a few ideas.  I could've made a stop-motion Lego trailer for Ranger's Apprentice, a creepy trailer for Life as We Knew It, or the one I ended up making.  The trailer that inspired me to make this was the book trailer that used whiteboard drawings to make the characters seem funny.

If I could make another trailer for the same book, I think I would make the drawings neater, and use a whiteboard that didn't have the lines on it, because the lines mess up the drawings.  If I drew neater, the drawings would look better, and they would be easier to understand.