In our English lessons with Mr Clarke, we have finished reading Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird”. Every couple of chapters we had to write an essay about what happened in the chapters and comment our own opinions. We would start these essays in class and would finish them as homework. The last essay we wrote was a persuasive essay about the death penalty, you could choose between being for or against it based on your personal thoughts. After having finished the book, we started studying the Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti. The two poems we have read are “The Bleak Midwinter”, which talks about Jesus’s birth and how he will return. And “remember”, which doesn’t talk about the 5th november, but about how Chirstina’s loved ones would have to behave after she died.
With Mr Gale we studied the Merry Monarch, Charles II. He was Charles I son and was exiled to France after his dad was defeated in the Civil war. He was asked to return to rule England after the death of the evil Oliver Cromwell. The country was in a terrible state because of his strict puritan rules, which did not tolerate any kind of fun because fun is only for the wicked. Charles II was called the Merry Monarch because he abolished all of Cromwell’s rules and made the people happy again. After finishing everything related to the Civil War we moved on to the slave trade. We created powerpoints in groups about how it evolved and why it was finally abolished.
In Mr Gales Geography lessons, we finished studying development, on which we created a powerpoint comparing rich countries with poor countries, their development indicators and gross domestic products. Then we made a more specific powerpoint about a poor country of our choosing, talking about why it was poor and how we could support it. After presenting those projects we started yet another one about a geographical disaster, like earthquakes or Tsunamis. We had to pick our own natural disaster, research it and explain its primary and secondary impacts. Primary impacts are impacts of the natural disaster itself and secondary impacts are results from the primary impacts. For example, a primary impact of an earthquake is the destruction of houses; whereas, a secondary impact would be millions of people being homeless and displaced.