Monthly Archives: May 2023

6th grade, Projects

Stock Market Game

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In my language arts class at Durham Academy we read The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. The Westing Game is a mystery novel about the pairs of the hiers of Sam Westing trying to figure out who murdered Sam Westing. In this book, each pair of heirs has a different strategy. One pair, Turtle Wexler and Flora Baumbach, try to use their clues and money they’ve obtained and invest into the stock market.

Because of Turtle Wexler and Flora Baumbach’s adventure into the Stock market, my language arts class decided to do the same. We worked with Mrs. Sprague, a math teacher here at Durham Academy, and Mrs. Donnelly, a language arts teacher here at Durham Academy, to set up spreadsheets with formulas to make updating our current stock prices easier. Each of the students in my class put 20,000 fake dollars into the stock market and over the course of the month of may,  we either gained or lost hundreds or even thousands of dollars. In the end, on May 30, 2023, I gained $740.94.

What I learned through this experience is to always check the news and the stocks history.  I checked the news and the monthly history of at least 20 stocks and finally decided that these four stocks were by far the most consistent. I bought 29 shares of McDonald’s, 15 shares of Costco, 5 shares of Microsoft, and 8 shares of Netflix.

6th grade, Projects, Writing

Storied Planets

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One of the books we read during language arts class at Durham Academy is The Last Cuintista by Donna Barba Higuera. The Last Cuentista is about a girl named Petra Peña who, along with her family and hundreds of others, has to travel to a different planet to escape from an incoming asteroid that would soon destroy Earth. After waking up on the ship in which she left home, Petra realizes she is the only person who remembers Earth and must use storytelling to keep both her Hispanic heritage and overall human history alive. An important theme in The Last Cuentista is how keeping stories going is vital to understanding the history of humans. In addition, stories are vital in learning and understanding more about people and their culture in general.

After this 3 month long book project, my language arts class took up another challenge, creating our very own ideal worlds. During this project, I imagined a whole semi-realistic (but not really) world, wrote a report on my planet, its political system, and things you can do there, and drew an illustration of my WHOLE planet. Overall, I enjoyed this project because of the creativity I could put into it from imaging and designing my planet to writing a six paragraph report about my planet’s goats and Glacier Frost Gatorade Cherry river.

I may have enjoyed this part of creating my very own Ideal World, but what came after this was even better… turning our six paragraph report into a 3D handmade book! We cut, glued, and painted with the help and support from the well known artist, Peg Gignoux! We started this book by akua ink printing on several different pieces of paper from graph paper to music pieces. After this, we cut out different shapes to get ready for the next step, gluing and collaging. We started gluing and collaging the different shapes and sizes of paper we cut out earlier into rocket ships, Gatorade rivers, aliens, and anything else you can imagine! Finally, after we were all finished with the insides of our 3D books, we glued on the cover, decorated them, and added the finishing touches to all of our amazing, creative, and kind of sticky, 3D books.

I would just like to give a big thanks to Peg Gignoux for helping me create my 3D Ideal world and Mrs. Donnelly for both planning the whole unit and for helping me keep my writing neat and legible.




6th grade, Projects, Writing

My Spin on Spin

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Giving a Ted-like Talk was a really good experience not only because it taught me the life lessons of public speaking but because it allowed me to teach and speak out about something that is important to me. My Durham Academy 6th grade language arts class worked tirelessly for the whole month of May to create our very own Ted-like Talks. In my Ted-like Talk, My Spin on Spin, I showed through tennis that succeeding is not just about the strength and brute force one puts into something, but it’s the technique and care one puts into something that leads them to success. 

Watching my peers’ Ted-like Talks I was amazed by their presentation and public speaking skills, even more because I hadn’t even started my Ted-like Talk until several of them were already done. One of the hardest things for me when creating a Ted-like Talk was deciding my topic. When deciding, I had to think about what I have been doing my whole life, what I love, and what is important to me. Still with hundreds of options this was an extremely hard decision. I realized: I can’t only have a topic that I like and that is important to me; my topic also has to be about something I can teach about through either a life lesson or something that my peers and maybe others do not fully understand. Then it hit me… Tennis! The spins of tennis would fill all of these requirements and make a perfect Ted-like Talk.

When creating my presentation, because I was talking about spin, some of the concepts I was trying to communicate needed a visual or even a video to help people understand. Spin is created by the angle of your tennis racket so with videos I could show how the angle of the tennis racket affected and spun the ball in an easy to understand and descriptive video. The hard part was making these videos… This process took hours, especially because I had to draw each individual frame in FlipaClip, an animation app. Research for this project was light, but writing even one paragraph per video explaining a pretty complicated topic such as the spin of a tennis ball is also a long process. Even with descriptive videos to go along with those several paragraphs this was still a hard and long process to discuss in a five minute talk. 

On the day of my presentation, I walked into our language arts feeling extremely nervous but confident in the long, painful hours of preparation of my talk. Being first out of numerous peers on my presenting day, I walked to the podium as some people settled into their seats with others still walking in.

Once everyone in my class took their seats, I took a deep, long, awkward breath to calm myself and started. In the first few slides in my presentation, I spoke both fast and with uncertainty, probably only taking one or two breaths every slide. As I coughed the words out that I had been practicing for hours before, I glanced at each and every one of my peers at least once to see if there was even a trace of confusion. Over the course of My Ted-like Talk, I became less nervous, speaking with both confidence and good pace, pointing out and explaining videos more thoroughly. Before I knew it, I was at the end of my talk and both clapping and compliments filled the air. I was overjoyed with the result and because my hard work paid off.

In the end, the process of making and presenting my Ted-like Talk and watching my peers’ Ted-like Talks was extremely rewarding because I could connect with peers who had similar interests on topics, learn about topics that I never heard of before but sounded really interesting, and learn more facts about topics I may have known about before. In large part, I owe these amazing rewards of Ted-like Talks to Mrs. Donnelly, my language arts teacher, for planning and pushing our class to write the best possible talks we could give about something that is important to each of us.