The documentary I watched for this assignment called "Pray the Devil Back to Hell". My dad brought the DVD to me from his work at the United States Institute of Peace. It was about Liberian women and their fight for freedom. During the Liberian revolution, it was President Charles Taylor against the warlords and the LURD. They were tired of being raped, seeing their children get raped, seeing their children starve, seeing their children fight, and seeing them die. So they decided to take matters into their own hands. Leymah Gbowee, noble peace prize winner, organized the women at her church to sit out at a protest and get President Taylor to go to peace talks with the warlords. They sat outside in the sun and rain, singing and dancing, for weeks. They made and even bigger impact by joining up with the Muslim women of Liberia as well.
Together, the Muslim and Christian women of Liberia were able to get President Taylor and the Warlords to go to Nigeria for peace talks. It took forever for them to finally agree on something. Taylor was exiled to Nigeria and the UN took over a transitional government with many warlords in high positions of the new government. The women continued to help with the disarmament of the country. Also, once the first democratic elections rolled around, a women was elected to be president. It was the Liberian women who ended the bloody civil war and brought peace to their country. The documentary was their story.
The documentary, though short at only 72 minutes, was perfectly paced. It outlined the bloody war and all the women's struggles. The way it was filmed made the struggle seem very real and upsetting. I would recommend this documentary to everyone, because I really enjoyed watching it.
To touch upon the three aspects of film, I think is kind of difficult with a documentary. The cinematic aspects were very good. The clips were mixed with the women talking now, and older clips of the actual protests and peace talks. The plot was very simple, they just showed the conflict and how it was solved. All the characters were very empowering and made you want to do more good in the world.
Overall, the Documentary was fantastic in my opinion and everyone should watch it. It was very powerful and moving. So go watch "Pray the Devil Back to Hell".
This week for my weekly blog post I decided to share another one of my favorite holiday treats, peppermint bark. My mom used to make us peppermint bark every year to eat on Christmas eve with hot cocoa. However, she stopped the tradition a few years ago and I decided to start it again this year. Peppermint bark is really easy to make and really delicious.
Ingredients:
1 package white chocolate chips
1 package semi-sweet chocolate chips
2 tsps peppermint extract
4 large candy canes
Procedure:
Put the 4 candy canes in a zip-lock bag and wrap a dish towel around it. Use a rolling pin or heavy pan to smash the candy canes to little pieces on a sturdy surface. Then set them aside.
Put the semi-sweet chips into a large microwaveable bowl and put in microwave for 1 minute. Stir the chips and put them in for another minute. Stir until smooth and completely melted. (You can also melt chocolate using a double-boiler, but the microwave is easier). Add 1 tsp of peppermint extract and spread them onto cookie sheet lined with wax paper for a 13x17 rectangle. Place in freezer.
Melt white chocolate in microwave for 30 seconds, then take out and stir, and put back in for another 30 seconds. Stir until completely melted and cooled. Then add 1 tsp of peppermint extract.
Spread the white chocolate over the semi-sweet chocolate and put the candy cane pieces on top. (you may have to press them in to get them to stick). Place it back in the freezer for about 15-30 minutes or until it sets, and enjoy when its done!
So, as you can see, peppermint bark is very easy to make, and its very delicious. Have fun making it and try to get the whole family involved. Younger kids love smashing the candy canes, at least me and my brothers do. Please enjoy!
This year, my mom and I decided to pull a little prank on my brothers. Instead of putting presents in their stockings, we are going to put these delicious lump of coal cookies in there. They are pretty easy to make and very yummy so I decided to share the recipe on my blog.
Ingredients:
3 cups of plain (all purpose) flour
1 1/2 tsp of baking powder
1 cup (2 sticks) of butter
1 cup of sugar
1 large egg
1 tsp of vanilla extract
1 1/2 tsp of salt
Instructions:
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and grease baking sheets.
Cream sugar and butter together until light and fluffy. Then add egg and vanilla extract.
Sift the flour and mix it with the butter and sugar mix until a dough forms. Use a gel paste or food coloring to dye the dough until it turns a dark coal-like color.
Divide the dough into 2 pieces and put one half in the fridge.
Break off chunks of dough until you get your desired coal size. Then roll the dough up and put it on a baking tray. Place in freezer while working on second half of dough.
After taking out of the oven, allow to cool for 10 minutes before transferring to wire rack.
Have fun making these cookies and pranking your friends and family with them!
For me, Christmas starts December 1st and lasts through the New Year.
So, naturally, my family started decorating last night. Now, my family
takes Christmas decorating to the extreme.We have 36 nutcrackers of all different sizes and shapes, and around the same number of small, decorative, glass (and other materials), Christmas trees. To top that off, we also have way too many ornaments to fit on a Christmas tree, even a really big one. We have garlands, tinsel, wreaths, and a little Christmas village. Christmas time is just the most wonderful time of the year!
Seeing as Christmas and the holidays are coming up, I thought I'd write a little something about winter. The best things about winter and the holiday seasons are spending time with your family, singing Christmas carols, and decorating your house. I love sitting by the fire and sipping hot cocoa with my brothers while watching Christmas movies. Another one of the great things about winter is the snow. White Christmas's are the best, and snow angels and snowmen are super fun to make. Also all the winter sports like skiing, snowboarding, and ice skating are extremely fun, ice skating being my favorite. Winter is a time to get dressed in warm, comfy clothes and walk outside in the cold, all wrapped up, with people you love. It's a time to be with family, and it's my favorite time of the year. I love baking sugar cookies, making gingerbread houses, and decorating the Christmas tree. My family has so many ornaments that we can't fit them all on out tree. Anyways, I just thought with my favorite season coming up I should write a little something about it. So Happy Holidays everyone!
Today I finished my 5 week long Drivers Ed course. Starting October 13th, I took a 3 hour long Drivers Ed course from 10-1 every Saturday and Sunday. I am very excited to start driving, though I can't do so yet because I have to wait until December to get my permit. Most people wait until right before they get their provisional license to take Drivers Ed, so it was weird for me to take it before even getting my permit. However, one of my good friends Kristina found a class out in Burtonsville that only cost $200. This was a good price because most Drivers ed courses, like the I Drive Smart course at Blair, are around $600-$700. So, Kristina and I went to the class in Burtonsville.
In Drivers Ed we earned everything you need to know out on the road, and to get your license/permit. To get your permit you need your birth certificate, your social security card, at least 2 things to prove you live where you do, and a document form your school. You can get your permit once its 9 months past you 15th birthday. Once you get to the MVA to get your permit, you will take a 25 multiple choice question test about general driving knowledge. If you pass they will give you your permit and your rookie-book.
To get your provisional license you must have held your permit for 9 months and completed 60 hours of drive time with someone over 21 who has had their license for at least 3 years. 10 of your 60 hours must be at nighttime and you record your hours in the rookie-book. After taking Drivers Ed, holding your permit for 9 months, and completing 60 hours of driving, you can go to the MVA to take the test for your license. The test includes a parking lot part and a part on the road. The parking lot section consists of parallel parking and a two-point turn. If you pass this section adequately then you will move onto the out on the road section. The MVA tester will have you drive out on the road for about 15 minutes and grade your driving, as well as asking you about what different signs mean. If you pass both of those sections then you can get your provisional license.
With your provisional you may not drive anyone who is not related to you until 151 days after getting it. You must also hold your provisional license for 18 months before getting your full license. If for some reason you get pulled over, they can restart your 18 month of waiting before you can get your full license. Once you get your full license you are free to drive whomever you want whenever you want as long as you're being a safe driver.
Recently I have been trying to convince my parents to buy me a pet hedgehog. However, they are very expensive. I went online and researched everything you need to know about taking care of a pet hedgehog and breeders in our area.
Why to get a hedgehog:
They are SUPER cute and make really good pets.
They are fun to play with.
They don't shed dander like cats and dogs do.
They are very quiet and easy to care for.
They don't need too large of a space to live in.
Hedgehogs that are kept as pets are African Pygmy Hedgehogs from central Africa. There are a couple breeders here in Silver Spring who work hard to make sure they are healthy. We emailed one of the breeders to see if we could visit her sometime and learn more about what having a hedgehog entails.
Hedgehogs are very playful too. They can be let roam free around the house, or kept in multilevel hamster cages. You can give them little toilet paper tubes to play in or make a larger maze out of PVC pipe. You can also buy them a bucket wheel to run on. As long as they have space to run around and play, they aren't a hassle and are very fun.
As far as food goes, hedgehogs eat stuff that is high in protein and low-fat. They can eat low-fat cat food or special hedgehog food. They are lactose intolerant so milk and cheese should be kept away from them. If you want to give them a treat, meal worms, crickets, and some other fruits are good.
I think I might almost have my mom convinced to get me a hedgehog. I mean who can resist a cute little hedgehog baby?
Life just pretty much sucks sometimes. There is no other way to put it when you have both strep throat AND mono. I have been out of school this entire week and feel really terrible. Yet, I am still expected to do this blog post because I emailed my teachers and asked them what my homework was. So here I am, sick with mono, strep throat, and possibly an auto-immune disease due to a low blood cell count, doing a blog post. So I figured I'd write about being sick.
I have been to the doctors twice this week where they drew my blood. On Wednesday they told me I had strep throat and my blood count was abnormally low, and should be a lot higher. They then drew more blood to double check this and they were still low. So, I went back today. They drew blood from my finger first but it was still low so now they wanted to test my blood for mono, cancers, and auto-immune diseases. It came back positive for mono and they are sending my blood out to labs to do the other tests. I then had to go next door to Clinical Radiology for chest x-rays to make sure I don't also have pneumonia. They are going to call back later with those results. For now I just have to keep taking my strep antibiotics which, thanks to the mono, can give me a rash. Mono goes away on its own so I just have to sit and wait to feel better. I am going back to the doctors for more blood tests on Sunday.
So this week I didn't really know what to write about for my blog. Nothing is going on in my life that I want to talk about. I'm glad that our teachers have let us write about what we choose now, but I still think that these blogs are a little bit dumb. I don't want to blog about anything really. I don't have anything that I am very passionate about so it's hard to decide what to write. I also don't have anything I am extremely knowledgeable about. So I guess I'll just write about our homecoming game yesterday.
Yesterday was Blair's homecoming game. We don't have a great football team so I wasn't surprised that we lost 22-0. This year, however, we've already managed two wins which is a lot better than we've done in the past few years. Also, it was pouring rain for about the first quarter of the game. Everyone looked like they had jumped in a swimming pool by the second quarter; we were soaked. The halftime show with the poms squad was really good and my bestest bud Alex Alia showed up then. All in all, it was fun and many people were cheering louder than the cheerleaders.
Tonight is the homecoming dance. Instead of being cold like the game was, it is going to be really hot because of all the people dancing. I love to dance so that will be fun and I like dressing up too so that will also be fun.
Our teachers have finally let us begin to write about what we want on these blogs we created. So I am going to start over with this blog and introduce myself more.
Hi, my name is Alia.
Now, what is interesting about my life..... let's see. I lived in Egypt for my 5th grade year of school and went to Cairo American College (CAC). We went there because my mom wanted to live overseas for a year with me and my younger brothers. So, my dad took a sabbatical off of work and looked for jobs in other countries. It was down to either Egypt or China and my parents decided on Egypt. What was very special about going to Egypt was that my parents actually met there and lived together in Egypt for 4 years during the 90's. That made it extremely cool to live where our parents met.
Another interesting thing about me is that I have been ice dancing since I was 5 years old. When most people hear that I ice skate, they immediately think about triple axels and jumps. In ice dance, we. do. NOT. jump. It is my biggest pet peeve when someone asks me if I can jump, and when I say that's not what I do, they assume I'm bad. There are 3 different types of figure skating. There is freestyle, pairs, and ice dance. In freestyle you skate solo and do jumps, it is the most common and famous type of ice skating. Pairs is similar to freestyle, except you do it in a team of a boy and a girl. They do lifts, throws, and jumps. Their lifts are called press lifts and are where the boy lifts the girl completely over his head. Ice dance is like ballroom on ice. It is, like pairs, done in a team. Ice dance does compulsory dances, short dances, and free dances. In the dances there are specific elements that must be completed. There are lifts, spins, footworks, and twizzles. In ice dance, however, the girls hips can not be higher than the boys shoulders, but there is more creative lifts than in pairs.
Maybe in another post I will go into more detail about the rules and regulations of ice dancing, but for now I feel as though this post is complete. I just wanted to introduce a little bit of myself and what I like to do.
This is me and my old partner at the Lake Placid Ice dance Championships in the summer of 2011.
The above links are some sounds and songs I found on various Creative Commons website that I think we can use in our Dystopian Trailers. I chose these two links because they both sound like they could be useful in our trailer. I feel that the first one would be great for an action or fight scene. The second one has a female voice in it and I feel some of what she said could be used as a voice over type thing in our trailer. I am still looking for darker more suspenseful music and sound pieces to create a more dark, depressing, and desperate mood.
The first clip is of my dog standing on our stairs.
The second clip is of him eating a treat.
The third clip is of him running up the stairs from outside.
The fourth clip is of him walking through our house.
The last clip is of him licking his paw while sitting on the couch.
I used my phone to take the video and used YouTube video editor to edit it. It took me awhile to figure out how to edit it because I am very technologically inept. I think my video turned out fine for it being 25 seconds long. I think for our next independent video project it shouldn't be so unstructured. We were told to go out and film anything we wanted so it was a little bit of a joke. Also I feel with all our other homework, doing an independent video project is not something we are going to fully invest ourselves in and they won't be very good.
I watched the R-rated trailer V for Vendetta, directed by James McTeigue in 2005. In the movie, a masked character who goes by the name V, saves a girl (Natalie Portman) from the secret police and takes her on as an ally to help destroy the totalitarian government. I'm sure it is much better than I am explaining it, seeing as I've never actually watched the movie.
Even if I haven't seen the movie, the trailer really makes me want to see it. It is exemplary in the fact that it draws the audience in and makes them want to watch it. At the same time it also reveals just enough to explain some of the move, but not enough to give the plot away. While I'm sure that the director made the movie fantastic, I can't comment on how his directing is because I've only seen the trailer. The trailer only shows clips of the movie and can't accurately say how the movie is going to turn out.
What I did see, however, really drew me in. To make our dystopian trailers good we need to try and draw the audience in. We need to try and explain the premise of the of our movies without spoiling our movie idea. This might be hard seeing as we don't have the equipment to make our trailers professional looking. Paying a lot of attention to the pre-production steps is going to be very important in making our trailers good.
The article Preparing Students to Learn Without us, by Will Richardson, discusses the idea of personalized learning for students. While it explained what personalized learning was, it was very long winded about it. According to the article, students learn better when they are passionate about what they are doing. For example, if a kid likes basketball a lot and they learn math based on different things they do in basketball, that kid is more likely to retain the information. The article also gives information about schools that are already using the idea of personalized learning in their classrooms. Many schools allow students to make plans of what they want to learn and they get guidelines of when to get assignments done. Then they go off and use their guidelines to learn about what the school wants them to, but in a way the students want to learn.
Technology is a very important factor in the idea of personalized learning. Many students do personalized learning through blogging, and that is similar to what we are doing. I think that we can use our blogs for personalized learning about things we are doing in CAP. We can research the thing we are interested in and then write a blog post about what we learn. I feel, however, that personalized learning would apply more when doing projects. If we have to use them for personalized learning, then I am interested in the dystopian societies we are learning about in English. I want to learn more about how authors came up with ideas for their societies. I can research these things and then post about it on my blog.
I read a movie review by Todd McCarthy about Batman: The Dark Knight Rises, on The Hollywood Reporter online. The tone of the review is formal, but not overly so. The review touches on the literary, cinematic and dramatic aspects of the film.The literary aspects are the plot, storyline, theme, conflict and etc. The cinematic aspects are the cinematography, lighting and sound, editing, and special effects of the film. The dramatic aspects is the acting, settings, and costumes.
When we write our own movie reviews, I think we should include an image from the film, as the Hollywood Reporter included for the Batman review. Also, we should mention each of the three aspects of film in our reviews. We should include of summary of the plot, and the theme of the movie. Our reviews shouldn't be too long, however, and don't need to go into extreme detail. I think it's most important that we watch movies we enjoy and try to have fun while writing the reviews.
(The skaters in the picture above are my friends. I train with them.)
Hey there, I'm Alia. I am 15 years old and I come from Maryland. Ice dancing is my favorite sport and I've been doing that since I was 5 years old. This is my new blog for my film-making class in school and I haven't ever blogged before.
My favorite part of the film-making process is either cinematography or acting. The news show we did last year is one of my favorite projects I've ever done. I was the news anchor in this project and it was really fun. I also enjoyed being one of the cinematographers for this project.
Ways I think we can use our blogs:
A way to show other people what our change projects are and what we are doing for them.
A way to continue learning outside of school.
A way to express how we feel about certain aspects of what we are learning.
