Blog for Week 11/12/15 - Bonechiller By Graham McNamee

     The book that I am currently reading is Bonechiller by Graham McNamee. This book is about a boy named Danny. Danny moves a lot and is used to not fitting in. He lives in a small town in Canada. He has many adventures with his friends Ashley a.k.a Ash, Pike, and Howie. While going home from a crazy event he gets attacked by an animal. He is not sure what it is but he thinks that it is making him go nuts. Throughout the book he is trying to figure out what it is and why it's making teenagers disappear.

      I think that the theme so far is perseverance. I think that it is perseverance because Danny and his friend Howie were both imprinted by this dog-like animal and they have to keep searching for an answer even though their lives are at stake. Howie ends up in the hospital because of this encounter, but that doesn't stop him from trying to find out what this animal is and why it's after him and Danny. I think that this shows perseverance because even though they may have gotten rabies, they still continued to go back to the forest and search for their answers.


I think that this book has a second theme as well. I think that the second theme that this book has is friendship because even though they haven't known each other for so long, Danny, Pike, Howie, and Ash act like they have known each other their whole lives. Before all the chaos about the animal happened, they all went to Harvest Cove and Pike had the idea to burn a gasoline market shop down. Even though his idea was dangerous they didn't leave him alone to get caught, they stayed by his side. They were all nervous that they were going to get caught, but if one was going down they all were. 

Commented on: Jude, Emily, Amille 

1st Quarter Reflection

     Some of the strategies that have benefited me are annotating my articles. This has helped me a lot because when I look back I will remember what I read. It also helps me because if we have questions about what the article was about I could just look at my annotations as a guide on what that certain topic was about. I may think that annotating is boring, but it really does help. I will definitely keep doing this because it helps me understand the article.

     My research skills have improved in the last quarter by having a lot of projects that involve researching. In those projects we had to use different websites and if we couldn't find what we were looking for we tried a different website. Two of the projects that involved research were Banned Books Week and the Poe Web quest. Some of the times I found it hard to find the information that I was looking for, but I just explored the website a bit more and eventually I'd find it. 


     In this class I learned a lot of new things about the world because of our article of the week. Some of the times I thought that I wasn't going to be interested in the topic but then I found it really interesting because sometimes they involved new laws, or violence that has happened in places that are near by. I remember reading about Syrian Refugees. The topic was really important because there was violence happening in their country and they were fleeing to other countries near by to get to safety. A lot of the articles were really interesting because some if the events were in our own country and I didn't know that was happening. This class is basically like our own news resource.