It's So Sad...

I can't believe this. But it's goodbye. That's right, this is my last day at Enrich... Ever!!! So hard to believe. I really don't want to walk out those doors for the last time is exactly nine minutes. Well, not exactly for the last time, but you get what I mean - the last time where I am a student here. 

It 's been a great three years! In fact if you asked me what my favourite thing at Enrich has been, I would tell you to go away and not ask such ridiculous questions. How am I supposed to choose one!?

All I can say is, it's been great guys, have a great Christmas, New Years and rest of your life, and... Goodbye!!!

(Sobs) 

This is Isabella, signing off... 

Writers Studio 201 #2

This is the second installment of my progress in Writer's Studio 201! I finished the story today but I'm going to upload it bit by bit, so you'll have to wait for the end! Mwahahahahahahahahahaha

I was not standing in this hat shop just for the warmth it provided, but because I had run of of hats. I was reasonably frugal, not buying the cheap, nasty things but making sure they are reasonably priced. And yet I had gone through fifty-nine hats this year. Slowly I circled a rack of patterned hats. There were turquoise ones with black zebra stripes, yellow ones with pink dots, green ones with slits all around the brim. None of them seemed quite right. I had been scanning the shop for hours. 
Before long the manager bustled over. It was a stout little man with a vast amount of rather mousey brown hair on top of his head that added to his height by about five inches. His eyes were very sharp, very defined, a precise shade of blue. Although he was short, he seemed to hold a surprising amount of power. 
“Everything okay over here?” He squeaked. He obviously decided that things were not okay, because he took charge. “You don’t want to look here, not many have been satisfied by this rack, no. Come over here, you are our sixtieth customer and I have kept aside something very special for that very person.”
I followed him through a door, through another door, down a passage, around a corner, past a window that looked in on what must have been his office. He stopped suddenly and I very nearly knocked him over. 
“How silly of me, I walked right past it.” He murmured, shaking his head so that his hair wobbled around dangerously. I wondered suddenly if it was a wig. 
He walked backwards a few steps to the window, and pulled out a little stool that he stood on in order to see in. He poked his hand through and extracted a set of keys. He then began counting the bricks on the wall. 
“Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine... yes, it’s this one.” He said aloud. He pulled the brick out of the wall - it came out quite easily - to reveal a small padlock. 
“Yes.” He smiled and looked carefully at the engravings on the keys. He chose one and began twisting it around in the padlock. 
“I’m afraid this takes a dreadfully long time.” Said the man apologetically. “To put others off, you know. Even if they do manage to come to this spot, retrieve the key, count the bricks and find the lock, if none of the keys work at first then they will give up. Very important that nobody gets into my office, you’ll see in a moment...”

Writers Studio 201

No, not 101... 201! That's what we did today at Enrich - Writer's Studio which is a writing workshop. Here is a little chunk of my story that I wrote today...

It was sweltering hot yesterday, but not today, no. Today it is so cold my nose feels like it’s about to fall off. As I walked through the streets earlier on this morning almost every group of people I passed were discussing how quickly the weather changed. It was unexpected - in the middle of summer, a hot, sticky day like yesterday was not out of the ordinary, but a day like today, where you could see your breath in little puffs, where the sky is darkest grey, where people are lingering in shops simply for the warmth they hold, is very strange. As I stand in the hat shop I find myself wondering if this frigid weather signifies anything. For yesterday, it was so hot, and the weather report claimed that it would be so for the rest of the week, and the town was organizing a carnival. “Perfect weather for it,” people would say. There had to be a reason for this, I decided.

Hey, Sarah!

Digital Citizenship.
Yep, it's like a whole other world on that little computer. Take a close look at your computer right now, as you read this. Is it a desktop? A laptop? Is it a big fancy-pants Macbook Air? Or is it a tiny little E-Machines laptop that takes a quarter of a century to load one page?
No matter what it is, there's a whole other UNIVERSE on that computer. You can pretend you're somebody else in that universe. You can hide from people in that universe. You can stalk people in that universe. You can do pretty much ANYTHING in that universe!
Not that I'm accusing you of blackmail or scamming or stalking or whatever. I'm just saying that doing any of those things, and more, is easy if you know how. And if you're rotten enough to actually do that. To all those bad guys out there, you're sick. Stop it! Oh, why would you do such a thing?
Anyway, I'm saying all of this because we did a Digital Citizenship workshop today at Enrich. It's basically like an Internet safety workshop. Honestly, I've had at least three or four of those this year, so I know the deal. Don't share personal information about yourself or you could get attacked by creepy guys! Yes, it's all very well saying that, but who's actually going to listen? I bet all the creepy guys got told the exact same thing when they were at school, and look where that's got them. The same goes for people that have gotten attacked or bullied or abused or scammed or whatever. Sometimes they don't even do that many risky things. You could go onto Facebook right now, if you have one, and post a sweet selfie you took. No harm in that, right? Right. But just remember, there are some sick, sick people out there and they are watching you. I've probably got one watching me right now, and so have you. So if you happened to be very pretty or very handsome, or even if you're an ugly old toad and the picture just made you look that way, you have no idea where that photo could end up. Go on, think of one of your friends. Actually, I'll do that. Let's say I had a friend called Lily. (I don't, by the way, this is just an example). So I took a BEEEYYOOOTEEFUL selfie, and Lily was my friend on Facebook. (Again, just an example - I don't have a Facebook, authorities, I promise). So I sent this lovely picture to Lily. She thinks it's pretty too, so she sends it somebody else, who sends it to somebody else, and somehow it winds up in the hands of somebody else, who is not very nice. The person who is not very nice could either: also think that photo is beautiful and track me down, and start stalking me and hurt me emotionally, or they could share it to EVERYBODY THEY KNOW. So somehow, that pretty selfie went from being a cute pic of yourself that you sent to your friend, to being a very, very public photo that's all over the Internet and people are suddenly recognizing you on the street. That's a little bit like what happened to a girl called Sarah who was in a video we watched. She had a REALLY public Facebook page, and then she moved to a new town, a new school, and heaps of people had seen photos of her that may or may not have been attractive or simply just really pretty, and then she's walking around town with her friends and EVERYBODY is saying hi to her. A boy from school as they walk out the gates, who she has never seen before. "Hi Sarah!" She and her friends just giggle because he happened to be very cute. But then it gets more serious, and by that I mean more creepy. Like, "Hey, dude, look! That girl in the pink top! That's the girl I wad telling you about!" Until finally it reaches a maximum where she and her friends are buying tickets for the movies and the guy selling tickets, who is a middle-aged man with a bald head and glasses, says, "Hey Sarah. What colour underwear today?"
OH MY GOSH HOW CREEPY!!
Now I am certainly not saying that this is going to happen to you. NO, of course not! I'm just saying that it COULD. Now, the Internet is wonderful. Incredible thing. Very useful. I'm just saying, you have power, use it wisely...

Is Mr Froggy Nice and Comfortable?

If you're confused by the title of this post, don't worry, you're probably not alone. Just give me a minute and I will explain to you why I am talking about Mr Froggy.
He is making a special appearance in this post.
So today - first day back at Enrich for Term 4, ugh, step out of the car, it's pouring rain, I run inside, nearly fall over on the stairs because they are so slippery, chuck my bag in the cubby hole and go to check my e-mails.
As I am reading Darryn's e-mail, I pause to look at the day plan. I see that we have a TECHNOLOGY CHALLENGE. Again, ugh. I hate technology challenges. I always just seem to float around the outside of the group's circle, telling people how long we have to go and occasionally holding something in place or rolling up a bit of paper. But today was different. I was more involved, I think. I was in a group full of boys, which I thought was going to drive me mental.
I still wasn't in the absolute thick of things. I rolled up the newspapers. Contributed ideas. Pointing out things. Watched, thought, listened, suggested, checked the time... so yeah, I was still a part of it but not the person that did everything, if that makes any sense. It's just not my thing.
ANYWAY before I go on I must tell you what the Technology Challenge was. It was organized by Nicola, so of course it was fabulous. We had to build a chair, using newspaper, masking tape and scissors. Wait, it's not as ridiculous as it sounds. It didn't have to be a proper, full-sized chair that a person could sit on (although afterwards somebody from my group sat on ours and it held for at least three seconds). No, instead it had to accommodate...

THE FROG!!!!!

Actually the one we had to use was bigger than this and darker.

So the task was to make a chair for Mr Froggy. Out of newspaper and masking tape. Using scissors. Yep, definitely a challenge but not impossible.

So our group was going great. We had the base, the legs, were taping them together in a triangle shape, with the strength of the structure in mind. It was Mr Physics Man a.k.a Max who had that idea, because he knew that triangles were the strongest structure. Looking around, we saw that ours seemed the best. The group over in the corner had more of a couch thing, and it didn't look very strong. The group down on the floor area were focusing more on a table to go with the chair, which is silly because the main point was the chair and besides the frog doesn't even need a chair. Or a footrest, because its feet are all tucked up underneath it. And the group behind us was going badly, because they were testing it with the frog and it was collapsing. 

Even Darryn and Katie came over to us and we heard them muttering to each other that they thought ours was the best structure. When we took it down to the mat for judging, we saw the end product of the other groups and were were sure we were going to win. The group with the table didn't have proper legs on their chair, the one beside that (the ones with more of a couch) had just a pile of newspapers taped together, or at least that it what it looked like, and the other group's chair looked somewhat similair. Ours was the best-looking and the strongest-looking. It came to judging, some students did the judging and - major surprise - they didn't choose ours! Disaster! Darryn thought that ours was the best, but in the end we didn't win. Argh! 

So that's why I still don't like technology challenges. 

HI DAD

Just want to make a shout out to my AWESOME dad, happy Father's Day! Oh, wait, that's just been, hasn't it? Oh well, that's not the main point of this post anyway.

You know for our Affective Domain studies on a gifted individual (I'm doing Albert Einstein. I've made a blog about it previously - if you haven't read it already then do so now) how there's certain criteria that we have to meet? Well, one of them is "Information and pictures about any coaches or mentors they may have had." Now, Albert Einstein didn't have any major coaches or mentors that I know of, but his interest in Physics was triggered by his Father, who showed him a pocket compass one time. Albert was curious and started to explore the reasons and the science behind compasses, and from then on he started doing experiments just for funsies, and as he did this he began to show a talent for Mathematics and Physics. 

So, the Albert Einstein you know of today - the genius, the mastermind, the brainiac - MAY not be as successful as he is now if it weren't for his dear old pa. 

I'm Such A Little Bookworm

Yes, it's true - I am very much the bookworm.  I literally walk around banging into things because my nose is stuck in a book, most likely involving war, murder or supernatural themes. Here are a few of my favorites:

What If They Find Us? by Kathy Clark
The Harry Potter Series by J.K Rowling
Light As a Feather, Stiff As a Board by Zoe Aarsen
Twilight By Stephanie Meyer
The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins

But anyway, that's not actually what this post is about. Today we had Round 2 of the teacher-led workshops. I'm in Word Patterns with the amazing Nicola, and today we were making crosswords.

Who would have known how absolutely frustrating this task could be! I mean, all you have to do is choose a theme, put in some words and make them fit together, and add some clues, right? WRONG!

On the second sheet I went back and back to the first mini-crossword, the theme for which was Sport. It was originally Dance but that didn't work so I rubbed it off and started again. I did this many times until finally I had finished the first mini-crossword with the theme Sports. One of the words was Emily because that was the only thing that would fit... hey, for all we know, there' a famous swimmer or runner or discus-thrower or whatever called Emily!

For the last five minutes or so we played a game on the iPads called Bookworm. It's highly addictive and VERY educational, I assure you. Look it up on the app store and download it, you'll have your eyes glued to your iPad/iPod/iPhone/Tablet/Android/You Get The Idea for the rest of your LIFE!

Mwahahahahahahahaha.