Author: benya20

One morning I woke up and looked at the calendar. It was my cousins birthday! I still needed to do chores though. I first did the washing, then I cleaned the dishes. I also had to bake a cake for my cousin. I decided to make her a vanilla flavoured cake. The first batch failed somehow. It looked all white and sticky. The second batch worked much better. When I took the cake out of the oven, there was a tiny bit of cake mix that poofed up on the baking paper. I thought of it as a minuscule cake.

It had taken days for us to reach the sea. No one had ever traveled outside the walls for this long for fear that the giants would eat them. But as suspected, most of them had been eradicated during the battle, the battle where 291 brave soldiers died… That battle was 4 years ago, only nine were able to survive and continue to live. No matter now because we’re the first humans to ever go outside the walls and actually see and touch the sea. There was also a dock and a strange-looking tower there and we wondered what were they for…

I never have a favourite book, it’s usually is a favourite book series. Nowadays my favourite book series is The Tickety series because it has just the right amount of every genre such as horror, mystery, action, adventure, Fantasy and there were a lot of plot twists. It was the perfect book for me and it occupied me for a long time and it was only 3 books! Set aside those books, the other book that is equal to The Tickety is The Dark Lord Clementine because Clementine (the protagonist) acts like a boy and I like it when writers don’t portray characters the way society does (I also like her fashion sense).

In the holidays, I didn’t really do much but go to town every day because my mum had to get sponsors for something I’ll tell you about later. She dragged me to town every day. I hated it because I had nothing to do and so I went on my phone and watched on Netflix a lot and this caused me to lose a large percentage of data :(. Fast forward to Sat May 1st. It’s the big day of my taekwondo tournament. We’ve been preparing this for ages because this year our club was hosting the South Island Championships. We had to get up sooo early and I still need to survive a whole day. the thing that makes me the sleepiest the most are taekwondo tournaments. Not only was I sleepy but I was nervous because it was my first time doing patterns and I was up against good veterans, luckily I wasn’t the only one that was up against these superstars, I was with Emily and believe it or not but she was more nervous than me. She was my comrade and my enemy on the mat. You see we were both doing individuals and pairs”Could we please have Kimberly L/N*, Ferj L/N, Courtney L/N, Emily Chan and Benya Dogterom come to mat two.”, echoed the woman on the speakers( all from my club). I was nervous, so nervous that I could feel the heat from my body blazing when I clapped for the other contestants. The caller for the mat called me to the centre. I waited while the judge wrote the scores for the presentation of my uniform I tried to calm myself by staring at the purple line that was on the tv*. The mat caller signalled for me to get ready and… Go.

 

Once I finished my 2 patterns I could walk off and let the 13+ red belts do their patterns. Straight after was the pairs. There were 3 pairs all from our club. In the end, I got silver for individuals and gold for pairs and now I feel more confident doing patterns.

This term, I enjoyed maths because I just love maths in general. I enjoyed the SRAs too because l enjoyed answering the questions and also because I have progressed through the levels almost 3 times. But the most fun thing, in my opinion, is the maths murder mystery because I love problem-solving and murder mysteries.

I’m really happy with my learning this year because in maths I learned how to measure odd shapes easily and how to measure the perimeter of a triangle. I’m also happy with my writing because I’m starting to write more and I’m starting to put more detail into it too. From my latest piece of writing, I got level 4 which is usually the expectations for yr 8s so I am above my year level when it comes to writing. The same is for my maths except I got towards 4, but that’s still a good result.

I don’t think that I have found anything hard this term but I know that I will find the problem-solving challenging that will happen very soon.

Last week on Thursday, we went on a dam trip, the Benmore dam to be more specific. We went there because we were originally planning to go last year when we were studying sustainability but then Covid came and we had to cancel the trip. I learned that they used a crane thingy to slide in big concrete slabs to stop the water from flowing into the penstocks for when they’re doing maintenance on the turbines or penstocks. My favourite part of the trip was lunch because I was really hungry and the wraps were really good.       

This my favourite quote beacause it means that giving others pain wont get rid of your pain.

1. I want to tour around the world with my best friend when I’m older.
2. I want to go skiing with my dad, my sister and brother inlaw in Japan.
3. I want to stay in Japan from Winter to Spring to go to the Cherry Blossom festival.

4. I have a secret desrie to be a veterinarian to help animals in need.

5.I love to adopt wild animals that are injired and have lost their parents

6. It triggers me when my sister scraches her ankle with her acrilc nails.

7. I LOVE DUCKS!

8. I’m half Dutch and half Thai.

9. I first went on a plane when I was 10 months old.

10. I like fill in art.

What is a growth mindset? Well, a growth mindset is believing that you can improve on basic abilities like cooking.

To me, a growth mindset isn’t really a big deal but I do know some times I have had a growth mindset even now I’m still using it right now because I have 1 year to train and become a black belt and I’m still a red belt that means I still have to become a black tip, and the worst thing for me is that I bearly remember any patterns except for two and I need to know the patterns from 1-5 and remember I only have ONE YEAR (sorry this is becoming a piece of writing explaining how nervous I am). Anyways another time I’ve had a growth mindset is when we had to find a place with a y in its name on a map but it had seven letters in it, and the closest place we got was liby but it was only 4 words. It ended up being library because the paged was printed missing some bits.

So it started when dad refused to let me go to the arcade with my friends. He didn’t let me because I “didn’t help him clean the garage”, I annoyingly said that I was at school, but he didn’t except that as a good enough excuse and grounded me. Eventually, I got bored and sprayed painted my bike yellow, then I went back in the house to wait. 2 hours later, I went to check my bike and it had disappeared. The next morning on the school bus we passed a yellow bike and it was strapped to a power pole.