New week of school equals new lessons in grammar. We are still learning about new verbs. We have learned about different kinds of moods. Some of them are confusing, but some are easier. The first mood is the indicative mood. It is the form of a verb that is used to state a fact or question. For example, “I like singing all songs.” Like is the verb in indicative mood and the sentence is a fact. The next mood is the imperative mood. It uses the form of a verb for commands. “Clean up your room.” Clean is the verb in imperative mood. Another mood is the emphatic mood. It is the form of a verb that gives a special force – or as the name implies, emphasis – to a simple present or past tense verb. For emphatic mood, you usually add do or does. “The dog does like treats.” In that case, does emphasizes like. All three of those moods were part of one lesson. The next lesson is a mood too, but separate from the rest since it was a little bit more confusing. Subjunctive mood is when the mood of a verb can express a wish or a desire or condition that is contrary to the fact. Sentences usually use were instead of was and would instead of will. Subjunctive mood can also be used to recommend or demand after the word “that.” It can also be used to show uncertainty after the word “if” or the word “whether.” Before these lessons, I had no idea verbs had a mood.
0 Comments
"May the Fourth be with you" is a typical thing to say, but today we have another thing to celebrate. Something that has nothing to do with Star Wars by the way. On Thursday, May 4th, it was Nation Children's Mental Health Day. "Awareness Day 2017’s national focus is on the importance of integrating behavioral health and primary care for children, youth, and young adults with mental and/or substance use disorders," the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's, also known as SAMHSA's, official website stated. No one I know even knew that today was National Children's Mental Health Day, which is not a great sign. Yes, it is fun to celebrate Star Wars Day, but we also need to talk about more important things than that. The great thing is that some Olympic Medalists, for example Michael Phelps, are help raising awareness. After all the effort to raise awareness I found out that House Republicans passed a “legislation.” Apparently, the legislation creates an even bigger problem for paying for health insurance. The prices are raised! How does this help children? “50% of all lifetime cases of mental illness begin by age 14 and 75% by age 24.” We are trying to raise awareness to prevent this from ever happening. “Research from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that among children ages 2 to 8, 1 in 7 experiences a psychological disorder, which is classified as a mental, behavioral or development problem.” You yourself could have a mental illness in the future or have it right now knowingly or unknowingly. We should all think of ways to prevent disasters like this to happen.
On Monday, April 24, 2017, it was Holocaust Remembrance Day. One of the causes of Holocaust was bullying. There are many forms of bullying such as physical bullying, emotional bullying, and cyber bullying. We watched a movie named Bullied which was a movie that really sent everyone a message that we are actually very, very lucky. The story started when the boy was in middle school. The boy was gay and he was bullied for that. I never really understood why people were bullied because they were LGBT. They are still people too. This reminded me of Out of my Mind where a girl was treated differently because of her disabilities. The bullying for him started with teasing but soon got physical. Adults were told of the situation of the boy, but unfortunately the middle school failed to protect their student. An adult even said that he was being openly gay. When we watched the movie, it felt as if the woman who said that blamed the bullying was the boy’s fault. The people that bullied him never got any consequences either! Then, when he was in high school, he thought he could start over. He was wrong and the bullying only got worse. The bullying was so bad he almost committed suicide. He ran away from home twice because he knew that nothing was going to get better. What happened at the end of the movie was the only good thing. The boy created a law suit and he won. He received hundreds of thousands of dollars and the schools were shut down. The schools had it coming because they never cared about the students. http://www.thebullyproject.com/
This week we continued learning about verbs. The first verbs we learned about were troublesome verbs. Troublesome verbs are some verbs that you can get mixed up with. One pair of troublesome verbs were lay and lie. Lay means to put or place. Lie means to rest or recline. Lay is transitive while lie is intransitive. Some pairs can't be distinguished from each other using transitive and intransitive. For example, lend and borrow are two troublesome verbs you can't distinguish using transitive and intransitive. Lend means to give something to someone and borrow means to receive something from someone for a while. Another type of verbs we learned about were linking verbs. Linking verbs join a subject and subject complement. Some linking verbs are is, am, was, were, are, acts, proves, smells, feels, seems, becomes, sounds, looks, appears, stays, and grows. Some linking verbs can also be action verbs depending on how it is used in a sentence. If there is no subject complement, then the verb is used as an action verb.
One example is: She looks sad after what a happened. She is the subject, sad is the subject complement, and looks is the linking verb He looks around the new room. He is the subject but there is no subject complement. Looks is used as an action verb One thing the U.S. and also the whole world is worrying about is climate change; whether it be good or bad. The new executive order Donald Trump signed changed the system we have now. This new order "undoes" many of our previous President's, Obama's, environmental policies. According to Channel One News for Students, “The new order will suspend, revise or rescind the Clean Power Plan rule aimed at reducing carbon emissions; ask the Interior Department to lift a moratorium — or a pause — on the sale of new coal leases on federal land; and scrap a limit of greenhouse gas emissions for construction of new power plants.” I don’t feel that great about this. Sure, this will open many jobs and opportunities for many people who are struggling to find one. But on the other hand, I also feel that this is not good for our environment. The world’s climate already has enough problems as it is. This executive order, in my opinion, was a huge mistake. His choice could make the air even more polluted. Animals could die from so much pollution like we learned this week. Global Warming could also worsen. I can see his perspective on this, he is really trying to get people jobs, but he is also jeopardizing the world’s health you could say. Apparently, there is an agreement called the “Paris Climate Agreement.” Trump didn’t stick to it but Channel One News for Students also states that “: President Trump's order doesn't say anything about whether he wants the U.S. to stay in or out of the Paris climate agreement, but he did promise to kill it during the campaign.” I don’t know what “kill it” means, but I do know that it is important that Trump stays with the Paris Climate Agreement. Even EXXON urged Trump to stay with it.
We learned about some different kinds of verbs this week. The first type of verbs we learned of were irregular verbs. Those are verbs you can't turn into past tense with adding -ed. Some verbs like run have to be spelled differently to get the past tense which would be ran. The next types of verbs were a bit tricky. I got the hang of it though. We learned about transitive and intransitive verbs. The first thing we learned to understand the new verbs were that there is a doer and sometimes a receiver in each sentence. The doer does the action the verb is talking about. The receiver is the person or thing that receives the action from the doer. Transitive sentences have a doer and a receiver. Intransitive sentences don’t have neither a receiver nor a doer. Transitive sentences have a direct object which would be the receiver of the sentence. We get mixed up when there is a prepositional phrase because sometimes there is an object of a preposition that we might mistake for a direct object. We also learned about phrasal verbs. I didn’t know what they were at first, but then I noticed that we use them all the time. Phrases like “put on, pick up, watch out, etc.” as all phrasal verbs. They either have a main verb and a preposition or a preposition and an adverb. The names of the types of verbs seem complicated, but we actually use all the verbs daily.
This Wednesday, March 9, 2017, was International Women's Day. I wish that genders were equal. The World Economic Forum predicts the gender gap won't close entirely until 2186! Women work just as hard as men do. So, why do we get paid less? Why don't we get the same rights as men do? International Women's Day (March 8) is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating gender parity. Women with full-time jobs still earn only about 77 percent of their male counterparts’ earnings. How is this fair? Did you know 62 million girls are denied an education all over the world? Around the world, only 22 percent of all national parliamentarians are female. That's double the number in 1995, but still a marker of slow change. There are approximately 781 million illiterate adults worldwide and two-thirds of whom are women. I don’t understand why. 60% of the world's chronically hungry are women and girls. Gender-based violence is one of the biggest causes of injury and death to women worldwide, causing more deaths and disability among women aged 15 to 44 than cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war. I want to take action. I want gender equality when I grow up, and probably every girl I know does too. Why do men have more rights? It is not like they are any better than women. We all need to come together to end our inequality.
This week we focused solely on pronouns. In grammar, a pronoun is defined as a word or phrase that may be substituted for a noun or noun phrase, which once replaced, is known as the pronoun’s antecedent. How is this possible? In a nutshell, it’s because pronouns can do everything that nouns can do. A pronoun can act as a subject, direct object, indirect object, object of the preposition, and more. There are many different types of pronouns, like Demonstrative Pronouns, Relative Pronouns, Reflexive Pronouns, Possessive Pronouns, Personal Pronouns, Object Pronouns, Subject Pronouns, Indefinite Pronouns, Interrogative Pronouns, and Intensive Pronouns. A demonstrative pronoun is a pronoun that is used to point to something specific within a sentence. These pronouns can indicate items in space or time, and they can be either singular or plural. A relative pronoun is one which is used to refer to nouns mentioned previously, whether they are people, places, things, animals, or ideas. Relative pronouns can be used to join two sentences. A reflexive pronoun is a type of pronoun that is preceded by the adverb, adjective, pronoun, or noun to which it refers, so long as that antecedent is located within the same clause. Possessive pronouns are those designating possession. They may also be used as substitutes for noun phrases, and they are typically found at the end of a sentence or clause. There are only a few possessive pronouns in the English language, and there are only two specific rules for using them correctly. Keep these rules in mind when using possessive pronouns, and you’ll discover that writing properly is easier. A personal pronoun is a pronoun that is associated primarily with a particular person, in the grammatical sense. When discussing “person” in terms of the grammatical, the following rules apply:
First person, as in “I” Second person, as in “you” Third person, as in “It, he, she” An object pronoun is a type of personal pronoun that is normally used as a grammatical object, either as the direct or indirect object of a verb, or as the object of a preposition. These pronouns always take the objective case, whether they are indirect object pronouns or direct object pronouns. A subject pronoun is exactly what it sounds like: a pronoun that takes the place of a noun as the subject of a sentence. Remember, a sentence’s subject is the person or thing that performs the action of a verb. When you take an even closer look, you’ll see that a subject pronoun is used as the subject of a verb, while an object pronoun is usually used as a grammatical object. Indefinite pronouns are those referring to one or more unspecified objects, beings, or places. They are called “indefinite” simply because they do not indicate the exact object, being, or place to which they refer. An intensive pronoun is almost identical to a reflexive pronoun. It is defined as a pronoun that ends in self or selves and places emphasis on its antecedent by referring back to another noun or pronoun used earlier in the sentence. For this reason, intensive pronouns are sometimes called emphatic pronouns. Ethos, Pathos, and Logos, modes of persuasion. We use these rhetorical strategies almost everyday. The concept began in Greece. Aristotle, a famous Greek philosopher who studied the art of persuasion, said that "Now the proofs furnished by the speech are of three kinds. The first depends upon the moral character of the speaker, the second upon putting the hearer into a certain frame of mind, the third upon the speech itself, in so far as it proves or seems to prove." The first strategy is Ethos, ethical or moral. It is the author's or creator's credibility, how believable it is, and likability. It is either intrinsic or extrinsic, inside or outside the text. The speaker or writer needs to demonstrate to the audience to be persuasive. It has the same root word as ethical and ethics. the next strategy is Pathos, feelings. They are scenarios, stories or statements designed to create an emotional response. When your persuaded by Pathos you accept a claim based by your feelings before fully analyzing how valid the claim is. Some emotions we are persuaded by are fear, love, patriotism, hatred, joy, humor, or guilt. Pathos is effective, but can also be manipulative. Some words sharing the same root word are empathy, sympathy, pathetic, and antipathy. The next strategy, which we did not learn at school, is Logos, logic or reason. It refers to any attempt to appeal to the intellect. It appeals to the left side of our brain by finding patterns, conventions, or methods or reasoning to be convincing and persuasive. Numbers, polls, facts, and statistics are things used as Logos. This will be useful for many speeches and essays in the future.
I personally love staring at the sky just looking, trying to find stars in Los Angeles's polluted sky. I consider myself a little lucky if I find at least five stars, but since February 6, I envy those who saw or caught on camera a beautiful sighting. The meteor, which was a vibrant green, one of my favorite colors, was seen flying over the Midwest Monday morning. Wisconsin and Illinois are the main witnesses. Witnesses from Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Iowa, New York, Kentucky, Minnesota and Ontario, Canada also reported the event. NASA meteor expert William B. Cook estimates that the meteor likely originated 60 miles above West Bend, Wisconsin, a small city 40 miles north of Milwaukee. The fireball traveled northeast at 38,000 miles per hour before breaking to pieces 21 miles above Lake Michigan. The blast created low-frequency signals picked up as far away as Manitoba, and exploded with the force of ten tons of TNT. That green fireball' blast reached as far as 600 miles! The time it passed over Wisconsin and Illinois was about 1:25 a.m. over there. I would’ve really loved to see it. A cop caught a video of the fireball passing over. It looked gigantic and very up close. That space rock dropped a shower of meteorites on several homes, including a six-pound chunk that crashed through the roof of a house in Olympia Hills. Overall, the public turned in 15 to 20 meteorites from the incident to the local police station. This is rare sighting.
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
May 2017
Categories |