After reading'Four Skinny Trees'

By Alice

Have you ever heard about The House or Mango Street? No matter how old I am, I love reading this book in my spare time.Especially since I came Riverside 4 months ago,this book courage me a lot when I feel homesick or helpless.The house or mango street is a kind of lyrical novel with short stories telling a little girl's childhood and her growth on the street  named Mango. My favorite chapter is Four Skinny Trees, it is about four trees who understand her and are understood by her own. These four skinny trees have secret strength. They grow up, they grow down and never quit their anger. Keep, keep, keep, trees said when she was sleeping. That is why I always gain power when I read this chapter.When I feel too sad and too skinny to keep keeping, when I lose my confidence to keep keeping, I think about these four skinny trees, and think about this little girl, all I learn from them is keep, keep and keep.I will never say give up, I will never escape when I hardly try to face and overcome the tough time by myself.
It almost the end of the quarter, I have to keep going in the way to learn english, I will never give up, and I'm really recommend my classmates to read this book.

My first experience of Thanksgiving

             By Marina Moto





               I went to visit my hostfamily in Thanksgiving day. I had a really good time and experience in there. There were two things which I learned; thanksgiving foods and how to spend Thanksgiving day.
              When I arrived at my homestay house, I saw many stuff for dinner in the kitchen. I was very surprised because I saw three huge turkeys, cans of yams and two huge bags of potatoes, so I helped with cooking Thanksgiving day dinner with two housemates. I was not good at cooking, but it was easy to cook. I cooked gravy sauce, mashed potatoes, tams and green beans food. When I cooked gravy sauce, I used gravy powders and it's miwed with water. Gravy sauce was a little bit salty for me, but I like that. Mashed potapoes and yams were similar to cook, I heat them and crush up. But in case of mashed potatoes, mixed with milk, salt and papper. In case of yams, put marshmallow on the yams and heat in a medium oven. Mashed potatoes were for dinner, but yams were kinds of dessert. Green beans food was good. First of all, green beans were mixed with cream chiken soup and fried onion pieces. It was heat in a midium, then. It was not soup, I didn't know what kind of food it was. My host mother bought two turkeys, ham, apple pie and pumpkin pie from store, but one turkey was free because a stranger who met in the store gave my host mother a turkey. So we got three turkeys, and we finished preparing for thanksgiving dinner.
               In the evening, I had big dinner with my host family in their house. There were sixteen people in the house. And we  had  a big dinner surrounding long table, and then, we prayed hand in hand. It was really good experience because I can't have these experiences in Japan.

Tsunamis

By Bakhytzhan

Hello everybody. Today I want to give you some information about my presentation from my elective class. My presentation was about one of destructive natural disaster Tsunamis.

First of all, what does tsunami mean? This term comes from the Japanese, (tsu) meaning "harbour" and (nami), meaning "wave". Scientifically tsunamis, or seismic sea waves, are a series of very long wavelength ocean waves generated by the sudden displacement of large volumes of water, but sometimes tsunamis mistakenly called "tidal waves”. There is nothing common between wind waves, because tsunami can be caused by underwater earthquakes, which is most common reason, by volcanic eruptions, landslides, or even by meteor impacts or nuclear test. Most tsunamis occur in seismically active regions such as the Pacific Ocean, but tsunamis can occur anywhere in the world where there are large bodies of water. The largest source region for tsunamis is in the Pacific Ocean with 71% of all occurrences.

A tsunami cannot be precisely predicted; however, there are some warning signs of an impending tsunami, and automated systems can provide warnings immediately after an earthquake in time to save lives. One of the most successful systems to predict tsunami is using sensor which is called  buoys.

As you know, the last destructive tsunami happened in Japan -11 March 2011. It was the world's fourth largest earthquake since 1900 and the largest in Japan since modern instrumental recordings began 130 years ago.

So, I think it is extremely important to know about natural disaster as a tsunami.