Rachel C’s Blog

On Friday the 16th of February our class watched a movie about India. The main topics of the movie were Varanasi, the Ganges River, the Taj Mahal, Hindu Ceremonies, the Gift of Carma, Delhi-old and new-, and Corbet National Park. Varanasi is one of India’s holy cities, and even though it is not one of India’s most populated cities it is still extremely heavily populated. For more information on Varanasi the site http://www.sacred-destinations.com/india/varanasi.htm Also to get a better idea of India’s cities population you can go to http://finance.indiamart.com/india_business_information/indian.cities_population.htm The Ganges River is the holy river for Hindus but, its also one of the most polluted rivers in the world. Actually, the Taj Mahal has an interesting story behind it. The shahs wife died so, he ordered about 8 architects to design the Taj Mahal. His wife’s body and casket was put into a room in one of India’s most beautiful building, the Taj Mahal. Amazing, elegant gems were placed all over the domed building and today it is one of India’s holy buildings. After the shah himself died he was put into the tomb next to his beloved wife. One Hindu ceremonies, that is celebrated almost as thoroughly as Christmas in the United States, is the birthday of one of their many Gods Krishna, who was believed to be born at midnight. these followers at this ceremony bring fire for they believe it is a blessing from God. Also followers of that belief tend to believe in karma as well. Karma is the belief that, what you do today will affect what you do tomorrow and what you did yesterday will affect what you did today, your actions will have extreme input on what happens in your life. In the city of Delhi you must always check the seal on water bottle caps because kids may pick them up off the street, clean the bottle, fill it with water from the polluted Ganges River, then try to sell it to you off the street. Food off the streets isn’t a wise choice either. People trying to make a little money may take old or bad food from anywhere they can get it and water from the Ganges, which will definitely take a toll on your stomach. Oh, also if your looking for a fun time you can visit the Corbet National Park and see the preserves they’ve set up for animals and can also learn how to ride an elephant.

I hope you’ve learned as much as I did when I watched this movie. It was a fun, interesting, knowledge filled movie that I think all sixth graders would enjoy.

During L.A. today we were passed back our tests from the day before, on our assigned reading books. We talked about complex and simple sentences, and we talked about the subject and predicate of a sentence. A complex sentence is one that has two combined thoughts. For example the sentence I wrote just a couple lines back says “We talked about complex and simple sentences, and we talked about the subject and predicate of a sentence.”, that is a complex sentence because I am talking about complex and simple sentences but also I’m talking about the subject and predicate of a sentence. I combined to separate thoughts and made them into one complete sentence, but I also could have split them into two sentences and they both could have still made sense. Also some of the words to create a complex sentence are and, or, nor, and but. A simple sentence is a sentence that only expresses one idea. For example ” Billie Joe, Tre Cool, and Mike Dirnt are all members of the band Green Day.” This is a simple sentence even though I have more than one subject because I’m not expressing a thought about each of them I’m only saying one thought about all of them. The subject of a sentence is what the sentence is about , or the noun of the sentence. A predicate is the action word, or verb. These characteristics of a sentence are what we learned about in L.A.

During L.A. we divided into our literature circles for our book discussions. The homework we were suppose to be handing in was our role sheets for our groups, such as discussion leader, word wizard, illustrator and more. After having our discussions, that were on either The Giver or Mrs.Frisby and The Rats of Nimh, that were both suppose to be finished, we graded each others effort through out the class. Our homework was only to study for the book test of the book you just finished.