A carnival of children

People in the daytime streets

Ring-a-levio warriors

Stickball heroes

Hide-and-seek knights and ladies

Waiting to sing their own sweet songs

Living out their own slam-dunk dreams

Listening

For the coming of the blues

I chose a stanza from “ Harlem: A Poem” by Walter Dean Myers to write my final response of the semester on.  Walter Dean Myers’ purpose of this poem was to describe life in Harlem.   I feel like the stanza ( seen above ) describes a street in Brooklyn, even though this poem is about Harlem, and thats why I chose it.  In this stanza Walter Dean Myers talks about the different stories of different people on a street.  He also talks about kids dream chasing.
I first made a connection with a Brooklyn street and this stanza when it talked about “ Stickball heroes”.  My dad always tells about how when he was a kid, him and his friends used to play stickball.  All the boys on the block would come out, and play from sun up to sun down.  I also made a connection with the first two lines of the stanza, and a Brooklyn street.  The first two lines talk about streets filled with children and adults during the day.  In my neighborhood, streets and avenues are busy with people during the day.  All of the culture you find in these two stanzas, you can find on a Brooklyn street.
This stanza also talks about dream chasers.  These dream chasers happen to be kids looking for a way to get famous.  In Brooklyn lots of kids have big dreams they hope to acomplish.  The first line I saw this theme in was when he said, “ Living out their slam dunk dreams”.  In this line he’s talking about all the little boys who want to make it to the NBA and get rich.  He’s also talking about the boys, turned teen, turned me who are fulfilling this dream.  
I chose this poem because it was about something I could relate to, city life.  From dreamers to legends, these are some of the people you experience if you when you come to Brooklyn.  Everything about this poem tells me Brooklyn culture.  

Blog On “ Coraline”

By: Neil Gaiman

     I recently finished the book “ Coraline” by, Neil Gaiman, for my book club.  Our book club chose to read horror books, and I picked Coraline as my book.  Surprisingly the theme in “ Coraline” seemed to be the importance of family, not violence or any other usual horror story theme.  Through most of the book the main character, Coraline, was fighting to get her parents back.  Through this tough journey she learned not to take people for granted, especially her parents.  When she finally wins her parents back, she loves them and respects them like never before.  

     Before Coraline lost her parents, she was disrespectful to them and very ungrateful of them.  For example her dad would make “ special recipes” and she would be disgusted, and make herself frozen pizza.  This shows she’s ungrateful because her dad takes the time out of his day to make Coraline and her mom food, and Coraline doesn’t even try it.  Also when Coraline’s mom offers Coraline to come to the supermarket with her, Coraline says no because she’s “ had enough” of her mom.  That’s not only disrespectful, but also shows how ungrateful she is to have  two parents that love and care for her.  Before she loses her parents, Caroline doesn’t even realize how lucky she is to have two parents!

     This changes when she lost her parents, and when she got them back.  When she realized that her parents were missing, Coraline got scared.  All her life her parents protected her, and never left her alone for long periods of time, now she was all alone.  She was also very sad.  She missed the warmth of her parents, and her dad’s recipes.  You could tell she felt awful in how she  treated her parents because she was always regretting being rude to them.  So when Coraline won her parents back she made a change and started treating her parents better.  She even decided to try one of her dad’s recipes, and she liked it!

     Coraline always loved her parents, but at first decided not to believe she did.  Once they went missing she showed she needed them and loved them.  If they had gone permanently missing Coraline would have been distraught.  In the end Coraline learned the importance of family.        

 Reading Response To “Faithful Elephants: A True Story of Animals, People and War”

By Yukio Tsuchiya

“ Faithful Elephants: A True Story of Animals, People and War’’ by, Yukio Tsuchiya is a story filled with death, sorrow, and many emotions.  In the story the three most important deaths, are the elephants’.  The elephants’ deaths represent the consequences of war.  John, the first elephant to get killed, dies almost on his own, yet his death still stands out to me.  Tonky and Wanly die together.  These two deaths stir many emotions not only from the zoo keepers that are forced to kill them, but from all of the zoo keepers that work in the zoo.

John is the first of the three elephants to die.  In my opinion John is the strongest of the three elephants because the zoo keepers try to kill him two other times without success, before they’re forced to starve him.  This is what the story says when it talks about the first time they try to kill John, “ John loved potatoes, so the elephant keepers mixed poisoned potatoes with the good ones when it was time to feed him.  John,  however, was a very clever elephant.  He ate the good potatoes...”.  This shows me that not only is John clever, but he’s a warrior too, being able to realize he’s trying to be killed and not give in.  They end up having to starve John.  John being the warrior that he is, lasted seventeen days before starving to death.

That leaves Tonky and Wanly to be killed.  Tonky and Wanly die as one.  When the zoo keepers describe them, they describe Tonky and Wanly together as if they’re the same elephant.   I think their attachment makes the zoo keepers decide they want to starve both of them at the same time.  Unlike John though, their deaths fill the zoo keepers with sorrow and anger.  It says that when their elephant trainer first found out that Tonky and Wanly died, “ He buried his head in his arms and cried...”.  The zoo and the elephant keeper loved these two elephants, and showed so much emotion when they both died.  At first they were sad, and then they became frustrated with the war because it forced them to kill the elephants.

The elephants’ deaths during the war hurt and affected the zoo and the zoo keepers deeply.  The importance of the elephants’ death shows because after the war the zoo gave the three elephants - John, Tonky, and Wanly - a monument in the zoo.  The zoo keepers didn’t get as emotional for John as they did for Tonky and Wanly.  John’s death was just as important as the two other elephants because the monument was dedicated to all of them.  The three elephants will always have a place in the zoo.