Mona's L.E blog

   In the third chapter, it first talked about the trauma Liesel was experiencing during night time. She would have nightmares of Werner, (her dead brother) and would wake up to her own screaming. However, it wasn't as bad since Hans would come in every night to soothe her, and make her feel safe. After crying into his sleeves, she would fall asleep once again to the smell of him, which she described as "a mixture of dead cigarettes, decades of paint, and human skin". Some nights, he would even play the accordion for her, where Rosa would be shouting at him for being so loud. Every morning, she would find him sleeping in the chair that sat in the corner of her room. Going back to the beginning of the story, she had still kept the "book" with her. She would keep it under the mattress of her bed, where some nights she would be staring at the letters on the cover and touching the print inside. Even though she couldn't read the words in the book, it held the mem...

   In the first chapter, it starts off by the narrator talking about the last time he saw the book thief when the sky was "red". (As explained in the prologue, the red represents bombs.) Here, he only talks about it for a few lines, and it sounds as if he is talking to himself, and not necessarily explaining the event in detail. After the soliloquy, the story takes off. The plot takes place in 1939 when the book thief was nine years old. She and her brother, Werner were on their way to Munich, where they would be handed over to their foster parents. Riding on a train, their mother fully asleep, with Werner in her arms, the book thief sat next to her, half asleep. It was then when she realized that something was wrong with her brother. His lifeless body laid there sideways and before she knew it, it was too late. Looking for the right timing, the narrator decided to "extract his soul". He described the little boy's spirit as "soft and cold, like ice cream....

   The prologue consists of four chapters, but they are all short with only a few pages in each of them, which is why I decided to summarize them all in one blog post.    To start off with the first chapter, I noticed that there are subtitles, (centered in the middle of the page, with bold fonts, capital letters, and star-like looking shapes on both sides of them) and not just a little, but quite a lot. On the first page of the chapter, there were already two of them. These subtitles help to switch the scene or topic, which happens quite a lot throughout the prologue. I also noticed that the person talking (the narrator himself) has a strong connection with "colors". On the first line of the first chapter, it starts off by saying, "First, the colors. Then the humans." Later in the first chapter, we find the word "color" again. This time, it says "Your soul will be in my arms. A color will be perched on my shoulder; a scream will dribble down the ...

 This year, we learned about how to improve presentations, through the slides, body language, tone of voice and more. Another thing we learned about is how to write good and persuasive essays, by writing references the correct way to writing them in the correct format. We even learned new applications that correct our grammar, citations, which will help us write better essays. Overall, I believe there were two main things we learned about, in the L.E class this year.  Firstly, it is about applications. I think that the first application we installed was Grammarly. Before installing it in the first semester, I had heard about it a couple times before, but I did not know what magic it could do. After installing and using it a couple of times, I immediately understood the reason why many people use and love it. When comparing my sentences before and after using the application, it is so much easier and smoother to read. Furthermore, it picks up the specific mistakes that my wind...

In today’s class, we went over the benefits of writing essays on computers, and also the three main points of writing good essays on computers. From today’s class, I was able to find more mistakes or improvement on the essay I wrote. Firstly, we learnt about the benefits of writing essays on computers, which are that it is easier for people to read, and that it does not use paper, meaning it is better for the environment. I was surprised to hear that some teachers in other schools tell their students to open spaces after each line of their essay. Mr. Paterson said that this is because the teachers find it easier to write comments directly on the paper. However, as the teacher had said too, this uses more space on papers meaning that more paper need to be used. As I am especially interested in protecting nature, I thought that adopting more computers in school is important, especially in Japan. In addition, the environment will be cleaner as there will be less paper around. This remin...

In today’s class, we spent time working on our essays subsequently from last week’s class. While working on the essay, I mainly focused on my grammar and vocabulary. This is because (I honestly don’t know from when, but) I had been logged out from my grammarly meaning that when writing my essay, there were no apps to help me guide and advance the grammar of my essay. Therefore, I had logged in back to my grammarly and added it back to my chrome page. When I had connected the grammarly to my google docs that had my essay written on, I immediately saw lots of blue lines across the text. To be honest, I was a little disappointed with myself, looking at the grammar mistakes I had made. I had realized that most of my grammar mistakes were about the use of comma. I believe that these mistakes occur as when writing sentences in Japanese, the comma is used in different places throughout the sentence. (Yes, I understand this sounds like an excuse, BUT it’s true!) However, it definitely helped...

My initial reaction to the app Mr. Paterson introduced to us called “zotero”, was interest. This is because not only when writing the essay for the L.E homework, when I wanted to list the sources for my personal project, it would take some time and difficulty. The difficulty was often caused by the difference in forms of the source, such as books, films, websites and newspaper articles. So when I heard that using zotero, you can list the citations easily while separating the way of writing them according to the forms, I was intrigued. It made me think about the possibilities in other situations of schoolwork. Furthermore, when downloading the app, I had no difficulties as it was easy to download. Therefore, I am excited and looking forward to using it from now on, hoping that it will reduce the time spend for listing the citations. Another application we learnt about is called “1password”. Although this app is useful, particularly for people who have bad memory, (like me) I was surp...