Setting + Comparison | Maggot Moon

Maggot Moon is set sometime in 1955~1975 when the space race was on. (I have a theory that it could also be a future where humans rebuilt and forgot about going to the moon before.) The space race is one of the main events in the book and there are many mentions about it. The location is most likely somewhere in Germany with a lot of right arms being raised and heels being clicked, likely to give the impression of a closely watching government. A lot of people are affected greatly by unseen characters who are only mentioned as "them" or "the Motherland".

Aspects of setting	Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner	1984 by George Orwell	The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Time	Past/Future (undecided)	Future	Future
Setting - physical	Broken houses in the neighborhood, a school, a wall, cameras, moon movie set	Screens, crowded streets, apartments, urban towers with	A wall, a forest, a citadel, a large battleground
Setting - organisation of people	Watching government, murderous teachers, mean kids, helpful grandpa and teacher	Watching government, hidden intelligence, snitches, language deletion, guidelines to live by	President Snow watching over everything, rebellious kids, rules

Protagonist VS Antagonist | Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner

Standish Treadwell is an okay kid. He is the 15 year old protagonist, narrator and main character of Maggot Moon. So far in the novel he has been bullied by prefects, seen to have a reading and writing age of around 4 years, and made the mistake of going over the wall to get a ball with his bud Hector. Well, all humans have those sides. His hero side is not too bad, but could use some working on. One heroic action was trying to stop his teacher from kicking Little Eric to death... but he failed that. Another one was standing up to Mr Gunnell, but sadly that was what led to Lil' Eric laughing at Mr Gunnell till he couldn't take it anymore.

So far the biggest antagonist is the government as they are watching everyone with cameras, bugs and spies. They are currently antagonising students and teachers at Standish's school through an intelligent-looking cloaked proxy with a gun, who I will refer to as "Cloakman."

Another antagonist (before being shot by Cloakman) was Mr Gunnell. This short-tempered, mean-spirited government fanatic of a teacher had done many offences against children such as beating them with a cane. After killing Eric, Hans Fielder (one of Standish's prior antagonisers) stood up for Standish as he had tried to save Eric. Cloakman believed the truth and shot Mr Gunnell in the face after seeing Eric's tarpaulin covered body.

The very first antagonists were the prefect Hans Fielder and his gang, who wore long trousers unlike the usual shorts. They were bullying Standish because they believed he was a dumb runt compared to them. After a bench was put in the far corner of the playground, they used that as a screen to hide the beating on him and other kids they considered "runts."

An Introduction to Maggot Moon

In English class everyone has been forced to read an exact genre of book, that genre being dystopian fiction. The book I "chose," Maggot Moon, is written by Sally Gardner.


It seems to be set somewhere in Germany. Every now and then there are people clicking their heels, stiffly raising their right arms and hailing the Motherland. The protagonist, Standish Treadwell, lives in Zone Seven. It is a place scattered with bombed-out houses and dodgy neighbours here and there. While reading this book, there are constant reminders that everyone is being watched. Cameras at school, a man in coat with a gun, government-paid spying snitches, and forced references to the Motherland. Even the evil government-loving teacher gets killed for kicking a student's head in.

Standish Treadwell writes very strangely. It reminds me of how I tell stories; he jumps from present to past to other time periods all the time, which would make it complicated for many people to follow. I for one am captured by his writing style. It highlights that he is mentally different from the other kids. You can also see that he is bullied, as he actually gets beaten up by a guy called Hans Fielder and his gang. He and his friend Trevor imagine about going to this planet called Juniper with Croca-cola plains and other beautiful scenery. Sadly, Trevor has already been established as someone who will disappear from the beginning of the novel.

The key challenge Standish faces is pleasing the government. If he gets out of step or continuously acts different, he will very likely be eliminated. (Some other challenges are bullies, cloaked men and angry teachers.)

Hope that was satisfactory.
Aight, I'mma head out.
Kyle

The Wild Deer Debate: Locating

This week we are doing some reading comprehension. It is on a debate about if deer should stay or not. Here is the PDF file version: drive.google.com/file/d/0B2crh7K1KlPJVkFqTG84Y3J4SXFVQWRqMU5VRXR2ZExoQzFr/view

Here is my locating work.

The Wild Deer Debate

In this article there are two sides to this debate-those that want deer to stay and those that don't Four opinions are given. Use this organiser to locate those for and against deer, with their reasons.

For	Against
Buck and Luke don’t think the small damage by deer is a big problem. They like it when they have healthy, lean meat in their freezers. They think that deer should be able to breed freely so people can keep hunting them.	Mike thinks aerial hunting is the best way of getting deer. He also thinks 1080 would also work well, but would be controversial. He thinks that if he had the conservationist job before they came, he would have said NO to the import.
Warren thinks that deer hunting is a good sport adults and children can do together. He thinks that hunting is a good job to have. He also thinks that hunting is not just killing deer, but the whole experience.	Debs and Michael think that in a perfect world, there would be no deer in NZ. They think that if there were no deer in NZ, the flora and fauna could live safely. They think poison might not be a good approach, since people will probably rebel more.

Chapter 16 of The Boy in Striped Pyjamas

Today at 9:40, Miss Hines read to us our class novel: The Boy in Striped Pyjamas. We then answered these questions about the book. 

Weekly Reflection!!!

MATHS:

I did a lot of revision, since tests are coming up. By revision I mean completing tasks on MathsBuddy.

WRITING:

For writing I had to write a few explanations. I (and the rest of my class) wrote one explanation on frogs, and started one on sleep. Below is the explanation of frogs.

(nearly) All about frogs

OR The lifecycle of a frog

A frog is a tailless amphibian with a short squat body, moist smooth skin, and very long hind legs for leaping. They are green and sometimes brown, and live in swamps and/or ponds to lay their eggs. Some frogs may be be poisonous enough to kill, while others are as murderous as small stones. So for this reason DO NOT attempt to touch a frog you don’t know about.

(Above: A poisonous dart frog, or Dendrobatidae)

The lifecycle of a frog is a very strange process. First, two adult frogs (male and female) have to mate, then the female will have to lay her eggs in a pond. The eggs sometimes would merge together to become embryos, and others may not even get past that stage. The embryos will then sit there for six to twenty-one days to hatch. The embryos start to look more and more like tadpoles, with poorly developed gills, tails and mouths. After hatching, a small tailed black spot, or a tadpole, will come out and start clinging to a water-plant, as to not getting washed away and killed.

After a while of being out of its embryo, the tadpole would get some external gills to breathe underwater with. Its tail would also get longer and longer, while it would develop hindlegs. After this stage it would look a little bit more like a frog, just without front legs.

About four or five days after that stage, the tadpole would start to live of food from its tail, slowly making it disappear. A couple days later the tadpole would have very small front legs. Then the front legs would grow, the tail would become shorter and shorter… and behold! A young frog would appear!

Now, the tadpole had become a frog. It would go on with its life, eating flies, jumping about, maybe even accidently eat a tadpole. But then two frogs would find each other, mate, and start the whole lifecycle all over again! Then the frogs will die. Yes, sadly all life must come to an end.

As you learned in the explanation above, a frog’s life cycle is a quite interesting one. You also learned about what a frog was, where they live, and how they lived. Now go outside and see if you can find one!

READING:

We actually started a new class novel last week, called 'The Boy in Striped Pyjamas'. It is turning out to be quite a good book, and I hope that there is a good ending.

OTHER:

Also this week, I have completed a Main Star. It was to make a Christmas treat, then give some to your classmates, friends and/or teacher. I made some Lego gummies. The blog post for this is under this reflection post.

The boy in Striped Pyjamas | Starting a new class novel! + YouTube updates

At the start of term, our class started reading a new novel. I think you can tell the name of the book, since I included it in the title. The book is about a little boy in a rich family, and the time set is when the holocaust was happening. We did a few activities for it, and they were quite fun. Please stay tuned for the YouTube updates.

(Click the pics to enlarge them kay?)

And now for the YouTube updates. My channel, Cubscouter, will have comic dubs, an explanation of nanotechnology and improved gaming videos coming up soon. But for now, watch my videos, get into my channel discussion and CUBSCRIBE! (#puns)

See ya, Simon - Make your own cover

Today, we started reading a novel called 'See ya, Simon'.
Miss Hines then forced us to make our own covers.
Truthfully most of the time I was staring at the screen doing nothing.

Kensuke's Kingdom Missing Person Poster

Week 7 Reflection

Literacy|Reading

This week for reading, we started reading 'Kensuke's Kingdom' by Michael Morpurgo.

After reading each chapter, we had to do an activity. One of them was to create your own book cover for the book. To see my original blog post for the book cover, click HERE. To see it now, look right beneath this.

Literacy|Writing

For writing this week, we wrote a Haiku poem. Haiku poems are quite easy, but the main points are: the first line has five syllables, the second line has seven syllables and the third has five syllables.

Now for this poem we needed to brainstorm, and Miss Panther showed us bubbl.us.

It is a website where you make what are called mind maps. Here is one of mine!







Then we had to write a Haiku, of course. Here are my ones!

Frogs

Frogs swim through water

Frogs smell a lot like madness

Frogs eating people

Nature

Nature is a frog

Nature is cute birds chirping

Nature is your heart

Cellphone

Phones can contact friends

Phones can contact family

Cell Phones can do lots.

Topic

For topic this week, Mackenzie and I have done a lot of work on our presentation. Here is what it looks like!

Kensuke's Kingdom | My cover

This week my class is reading a novel for fun.  It is called Kensuke's Kingdom, and we are supposed to make heaps of different DROs (Digital Reading Objects) to represent our reading. Today we made a new cover for the book! here is my one.

Week 4 reflection

So this week, I didn't do my DLO for maths, so there will be no numeracy.

Literacy

This week, for the word above I already forgot we did poetry. Wait what are we talking about? OMG my head hurts so much. Oh yeah poetry. We wrote a poem that made no sense. View it at this link I nearly forgot about but then remembered. MY DIDGERI- wait what are talking about again?

Animation

 I made an animation. As you will see a man goes to space. Link to the video is HERE, but if it doesn't work because your internet modem just caught on fire because you are hiding from a psycho killer here is the video on my blog.

Maths

Okay so for maths I- woops I forgot what I was going to say. That must be very awesome and gangster so I will Hey is that a whole air plane on my windowsill!? Wait were where we? Okay I will just skip this subject. (This is mostly because I did not do my DLO, or Dopey Latched Operation)

Last, but not least: Topic

For topic, us commies (AKA Mackenzie and I) are starting on our topic inquiry.

We are doing the reason Lord Rutherford of Nelson is on the 100 dollar note.

What I know about him already is that he did some science stuff, like changing the view of atoms. Yeah, that's what he did! That's the first thing I remembered- hey what? Woops, just slipped my mind. 

Thanks for reading this - uh - blog post, and bye!

Main Stars: Read a book! Blog about it! The fly papers: The flytrap snaps & The Sundew Stalks

I read 'The Flytrap Snaps' a long time ago, but I just found out that a. I didn't do a book review yet and b. there was a new book in the series of The Fly Papers, 'The Sundew Stalks'. So I read them both, and here are the reviews:

   The Flytrap Snaps is a great book, and I really liked it. I recommend this book (and the whole series) to people from 9 to 100, because it is a great story with colorful writing (not literally). My favorite part is when the flytrap tries to be a horror movie star, but ends up in a hair product ad!! HA!
    The Sundew Stalks is also a really good book, and the part that made me go 'awwwww' is when the little pieces of moss, who have been mutated, want their mummy which is the Andromeda plant.

Aristotle's nostril

Title: Aristotle's nostril
Author: Morris Gleitzman
Genre: Humor

Aristotle is a nose germ. He wants to be happy, but because there are rules he gets banished. For some stupid reason his brother Blob does too! They go out of their beautiful nostril, and find.... another nostril? Join them on their adventures as they tell everyone of their findings.

The land of utter nonsense

Title: The land of utter nonsense
Author: Colin West
Genre: poetry
Summary: This is a good book with lots of poems that are picked by Colin West. I will show you some examples!

Finn's Quest Coldkeep Castle

Title: Finn's Quest Coldkeep Castle
Author: Eirlys Hunter
Genre: Fiction, Fantasy

This is book two of Finn's quest! I didn't read the last one, but it is still understandable. I think it is awesome how Finn can go to this game world, but it is scary for him because he doesn't know what happens if he dies. In this book, Finn has to return to Coralia to save his father. He finds out that his dad is in a dungeon, at Coldkeep Castle, and he sets out to find him. He meets a girl called Nell, and she helps him on the way. What will happen? Read to find out...

Milo and the restart button

Title: Milo and the restart button
Author: Alan Silberberge
Genre: Humor, Realistic Fiction

Summary: Milo's mom is dead. To him, it is like a restart button. He,his sister and his dad move once again to another house. He will need a long time to get used to this new life....

Jack plank tell tales

Title: Jack plank tell tales
Author: Natalie Babbit
Genre: Adventure

Jack Plank was a pirate, but now he had to go away from his bucaneering. Join him as he makes friends at a hotel, and finds out what to do as a business!

Jamie Brown is not rich

Title: Jamie Brown is not rich
Author: Adam Wallace
Genre: Humor

Summary: Jamie Brown and his family have no money, not even enough to buy fast food. Their mini golf course is home made. They have to fake that they are full so everyone can eat something. Sometimes there are rich kids who come to jeer at them! Jamie Brown doesn't think they are just on the wrong side of the tracks; he thinks they're on the wrong side of the wrong side of the tracks. But then a mail from Barnaby Von. Barnabus has a check with nearly 100,000,000,000,000 dollars! What will happen?

Boom!

Title: Boom!
Author: Mark Haddon
Summary: Jimbo is just an ordinary child, but when he finds out his sister Becky lied to him about changing schools he also realizes something very scary; his teacher are aliens with no belly buttons! With an awesome nuclear-powered adventure coming right at them, can they stop their teachers?