TOP TEN LIST OF WHAT IM GRATEFUL FOR-THANKSGIVING 2010

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for many things. My life is good and I’m glad to have all my family. They would be at the top of my list. But, there are a few more things I’m thankful for this Thanksgiving…

10. My house. Even though most of the time I would consider my house as a necessity, there are many people throughout the world who would do anything to sleep under a warm roof.

9. Dr. Pepper. Dr. Pepper is the best drink ever invented. It’s so bubbly and delicious. It’s like Cherry Coke and Root Beer mixed together.

8. Clothes. If I didn’t have clothes, I probably wouldn't be able to go out in public; so, my life would be very boring. I’m grateful I don’t have a boring life.

7.  Facebook. Facebook is a way I keep in touch with all my friends that go to different schools. I can keep up with everything, and talk to all my distant relatives.

6. My iPod. The iPod is the greatest innovation in the history of mankind. You can listen to music whenever and wherever you want. Before I had my iPod I could only listen to music in my mom’s car when she wouldn’t want to listen to her own music, which was like always. So, now I can listen to all my music whenever I want!

5. Arby’s. Arby’s has the best Italian sandwich in the whole wide world. It is so warm and cheesy and it has banana peppers on it which makes it even better!

4. My phone. I’m glad to have my own phone so I can talk to my friends outside of school. Plus, we don’t have a home phone, so I wouldn’t be able to talk to my friends.

3. Taco Bell. Taco Bell is always a pick-me-up. It is really yummy, especially at night for a fourth meal. Mexican food is also my favorite type of food, so Taco Bell is definitely the best fast food place around.

2. My friends. These people make school fun. If it weren't for them school would be so much more boring. I love my friends.☺

1. Soccer. Soccer is a lot of fun. I’m glad to have it in my life. This sport is filled with kicking soccer balls and pushing people down. It is so much fun! Personally, I like indoor better than outdoor and I like playing in domes.

Aborigines of Australia

          Rabbit Proof Fence and Walkabout are very similar in many ways. Both stories are about the Aborigine people of Australia. In Rabbit Proof Fence, the three Aborigine girls are forced away from their mothers by the police and taken to a camp-like place. In Walkabout, an Aborigine boy helps Mary and Peter, (two Americans,) when they are stranded in the hot, dry land of the Outback. Rabbit Proof Fence is a story where it shows how Aborigines are treated in Australia. The police abduct the three Aborigine girls, Molly, Daisy and Gracie; Molly and Daisy are sisters while Gracie is their cousin. The white people of Australia want to “breed the African American out of them.” The police take them to a camp where they live with about fifty other Aborigine children. They are taught the European way of life. After a few long days at the camp, the three girls escape during the church ceremonies. The girls travel through the Outback of Australia, trying not to get caught by the tracker, Moodoo, or the police. In Walkabout, Mary and Peter’s plane crashed near the deserts of Australia, far away from any civilization. They are the only survivors from the plane. On their journey to civilization of some sort, they come across an Aborigine boy traveling by himself, a “bush boy.” He helps them survive by finding them food and water. From both of these stories, one can conclude that the Aborigine culture is not as developed as some of the other cultures around the world. Even though this may be true, this doesn’t mean that those cultures are superior to the Aborigine culture. The white people of Australia thought that they were helping the Aborigines by abducting them and imposing their own culture. I don’t think this was right; no culture is superior to another culture.

If your over 12, no trick-or-treating for you!





In Belville, Illinois, trick-or-treaters are being restricted. If you are over twelve, you cannot go out on Halloween unless you want to be fined. I think this is a really dumb idea.

First off, a lot of people might not even follow this law. Some people get so into Halloween that they would rather go out and risk being stopped by a police car than sit at home. Secondly, how can a police man know what age a kid is? If they are wearing masks and body suits, how can a police man tell if it is even a kid? Many kids will very likely be upset with this new law. Halloween is many kid’s favorite holidays. They get to go out and get free candy, what kid wouldn’t like it? On the other hand, there have been many incidents with teenagers being destructive on Halloween night. This was probably the motive of the people when they thought of this law. They don’t want stupid teenagers going around setting buildings on fire or tee-peeing houses. This would be a hard controversy to decide. Do you not let the kids go trick-or-treating all together? Or should you just let them go and then try and keep control of the bad kids? Obviously, the people of Belville decided to take the first route. Personally, I don’t think that is a good idea. Many kids will be mad at this decision. Many kids will go out and trick-or-treat anyways. Plus, like I mentioned earlier, how could the police man even make sure the child is under twelve? It doesn’t seem logical. What if they are wearing a mask? What if they are wearing a suit that covers their whole body? Also, if the police men are driving around looking for older kids, couldn’t they just drive around looking for suspicious behavior? I think this idea had a good concept behind it, but I doubt it will work effectively.

Is Leblouh a Way to Attract a Soul Mate, or an Unhealthy Threat to Women's Lives?

Leblouh is a tradition practiced Mauritania. Women are forced to sit in rooms and eat for at least 90 days; men in Mauritania admire obese women. They believe they will find a husband if they force fatten themselves.

Leblouh is unhealthy and threatening to the lives of many women in Mauritania.

           Young women in Mauritania have two choices. One, they eat until they bulge, or two, they get beaten brutally."My mother started fattening me forcibly when I was 13-years-old. She used to beat me to eat more oiled couscous and fat lamb's meat. Each time I thought my stomach would explode," Selekeha Mint Sidi of Mauritania remembers. This type of tradition puts the young ladies at a risk of many health problems. Vomiting is a daily habit for girls in Mauritania. Their stomach cannot even contain all the food that is being stuffed into them. When you vomit, the acid sticks to your teeth. After a while, your teeth will turn as yellow as a ripe banana and then they will begin to rot away one tooth at a a time. Why do these women need a man so bad? The only thing they will need after this, is a pair of dentures. Mar Jabero Capdeferro, in charge of gender programs for the U.N. Population Fund in Mauritania, states, "Nowadays, the girls are force-fed with chemicals used to fatten animals...they're very fat, in their forties and fifties, they cannot even move, they have hypertension, diabetes, and so on." The chemicals used for fattening animals, obviously should not be used on young girls like this. It is repulsive to think girls are being forced to drink this. If you do these horrendous things to your body, it will strike back. As Capdeferro says, when the women get older they are faced with things like diabetes and hypertension. Diseases like these are fatal. Is finding a soul mate really worth facing death?

Is Bussing Really Worth $400 a Year?

          In Massachusetts, there have been many heated debates over whether to make parents pay for their child to ride the bus to school or not. Since the beginning, public transportation to school has been the easy route for many parents. It’s free, good for the environment, plus they can get to work earlier and not have to worry about getting their child to school. Having a bus just makes life easier for everyone.

On average, if the proposal goes through, parents would have to pay about $400 a year per child. If you have two kids, that’s $800 a year. If you have three kids, that’s $1,200 a year. Let’s not even think about someone having more than three kids. Imagine going from paying nothing to all of a sudden paying over $1,000 for bussing! This is a very big change and most Americans would not be able to handle it. The majority of families do not have this kind of money to just give to the transportation system, so the busses will most likely be very empty. If they only have a handful of students on the bus, they will probably raise the price even more to accommodate all of the expenses with the little amount of people paying. Then those people, who already pay the $400, won’t want to pay anymore so they will probably leave the system too. Basically, there won’t be any students riding the bus.

Let’s say a car emits x amount of pollutants into the air on the way to school. There are 50 kids driving to school in 50 different cars because their parents could not afford for their child to ride the bus. That’s 50x amount of pollutants being emitted into the air just for one day for one school. If there is 500,000 schools in the U.S., that’s 25,000,000x pollutants in one day. There is at least 200 days of school. Therefore, per year, at least 5,000,000,000x pollutants are contaminating our air because bus transportation is too expensive. Now, if all these students just rode the bus, that number would drop dramatically. Riding a bus helps the environment. We can’t help the environment though if we cannot afford it.

Expensive bussing leads to no students wanting to ride the bus. No students riding the bus leads to parents taking their kids to school which leads to more pollutants being emitted in our air. That leads us to a bad environment. The list is endless.

This proposal will just turn everything into a huge mess.

Haley B. A to Z

A is for afraid. I am afraid of whales, possums and the oceans. Afraid as in I can't even think about those things without freaking out.

B is for biology. Science is my favorite subject and it has been ever since I was little. It seems to fascinate me.

C is for Christmas. Christmas is my favorite holiday for two reasons. One, we get two weeks off of school and two, everyone is always so much happier.

D is for dogs. I have two really small dogs. One we found on a porch in Kentucky and the other we adopted from someone who abused him. Both of our dogs were like rescue dogs.

E is for Emily. She is sort of like our "nanny," but she's our cousin. She picks my sister and me up from school and "babysits" us until about six every day.

F is for family, I have a big one. I have 52 cousins and 24 aunts and uncles. Plus 3 sets of grandparents. We all live by each other too, except for two of my cousins who actually live in Florida.

G is for girl. I am a girl but I feel like girls have always had it harder than boys. I wonder what it would be like to be a boy for a day...

H is for my name Haley. H is also for the comet I was named after, Halley's Comet.

I is for ice cream, preferably moose tracks. This is my all time favorite kind of ice cream and every day I have a bite of it before I go to school.

J is for jump rope. I love using jump ropes; I once went ten minutes without stopping or messing up.

K is for Kari. Kari has been my best friend since first grade and we have always been in the same class until now, she goes to Churchill.

L is for listening. I have a tendency to not be a great listener all the time. Sometimes I think about stuff to much and I will forget someone is even talking to me. It is kind of a bad habit.

M is for music. I love listening to music, plus it's a pick-me-up when I'm sad.

N is for Natalie. I have one sister and that is her name, she's really annoying sometimes but other times she can be alright. She's ten and in fifth grade.

O is for the Office, which is my all time favorite television show.

P is for purple. Purple is my favorite color and always has been. I like the light shades of purple like in little flowers but I also like the dark shade of purple like in my nail polish. No matter what shade, purple will still be my favorite over any other color.

Q is for quitting, I do not like to quit, nor do I like to back down on things I say I will do. It makes me feel really bad.

R is for rain. I love listening to the rain and watching it. I especially like it when we're at school and it's raining because it is so dark outside and it feels like nighttime.

S is for sports. I love getting active. S is also for soccer which I have been playing since I was six.

T is for tether ball. I don't know if that can be considered a sport but I hate it. I always get hit in the face and I am really bad at it. The game doesn't even make any sense, who ever would've come up with an idea about hitting a hard ball around a pole?

U is for uncertain. I always seem to be uncertain about things. It always seems hard to figure out what I think is right and what I think isn't.

V is for vacations. I love taking vacations whether it's just to a hotel for a soccer tournament or to Florida, I like to get away from it all and just have fun.

W is for wet. I hate getting wet. I don't like pools, water parks, sprinklers or anything that involves me getting wet while I am dry.

X is for x-rays. I got an x-ray for my finger when I broke it in gym two years ago. At first, I didn't tell anyone about it for a day or so, but it hurt really badly and it was huge and purple so I decided to tell my parents who took me to the doctors.

Y is for yelling. I hate when people yell, I do not like to listen to it. It's too loud and it makes me feel uncomfortable.

Z is for the zoo. The zoo is my favorite place to go. I love seeing all the different animals in one place, it's really cool!