My favorite author, Louis Sachar

Louis Sachar was born in New York on March 20, 1954. He wasn't interested in reading books until high school. When he was in a high school, he became an addicted reader. The authors who inspired him were J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut.

During his last year at his college, he helped out at an elementary school called Hillside School and this gave him an idea to make his first book, Sideways Stories from Wayside School. But he generally gets ideas from his brain not surroundings or from his life.

When he writes a book, he has three rules which he always does.

First, he works in his office everyday. He never allows anyone to come into his office even his family because it makes him hard to think of good ideas and breaks the spell. But he only allows his dog and cat to come in and stay.

Second, he writes about 2 hours a day. If he works more than 2 hours, he can't think of any good ideas so it makes him waste time. Sometimes, when he read agian what he wrote, he was surprised that he thought of such a brilliant idea.

Last, he never tells anybody what he is writing about until he finishes his book.

I was little bit surprised that he has rules something like these. And what I think a reason why he is such a good writer is that because he always thinks a lot and then starts to write.

Small Steps

This is a book called 'Small Steps' by Louis Sachar. This book is a succesion story of 'Holes'. The main character, Armpit, was at the Camp Green Lake, the place to which the people who did something wrong such as stealing and fighting were sent. After he was released from the Camp Green Lake, he dug a hole for Raincreek Irrigation and Landscaping and got paid every month. With that money, he went to a school. He missed two grades because he had been at the Camp Green Lake for two years. He decided to take small steps with his neibour called 'Ginny' to achieve plans such as graduating from high school and attending college. Ginny, who could not speak properly, was the only person who believed Armpit. His plan seemed to work well, but one day, his friend X-Ray thought of the other plan to get rich quickly. Armpit decided to give up his own plan and accepted X-Ray's plan. However, it did not work well because they tried to take big steps, different from those small steps that Armpit once tried. And through this failiure, Armpit realized the importance of small steps.

After you read this book, I'm sure you'll learn lots of lessons. And that's the reason why I recommend this book.

Typhoon Morokat

In Southern Taiwan, many roads and bridges were damaged by the torrential rain. We call this torrential rain 'Typhoon Morokat'. Warm air had collided with cold air then they spun clockwise counter and when the wind got very strong, Typhoon Morokat occured. Typhoon Morokat first occurred at the Pacific Ocean and then it came straight forward to Taiwan.

Mountains are made of rocks and if it rains too much, the water soaks through the mud which causes the separation between the rocks and the muds of the mountain. Then, the mountain slides down and we call this diaster mudslide. When mudslide occurs, it's means like tons of rocks are falling down. This terrible mudslide damaged lots of buildings and killed many people as well like Typhoon Morokat did.
Mostly, typhoon occurs at north and south of equator. Every country near the equator had seldomly damaged by typhoon. For an instance, Indonesia, Malaysia, Ecuador and Kenya had rarely destroyed by typhoons.

About Middle School

Hi, my name is Young Woo. I'm from South Korea and I'm 6th grader in Ms marrello's class. This is my half a year in JIS. I like playing the violin so I play violin for the musical instrument. And I like to play sports such as soccer, basketball, baseballl etc. Middle School has more various activities than Elementary School. Middle School is awsome! Also, we can choose any food whatever we want like, pizza, hamburger, kebab and others. Above all, the most interesting thing in Middle School is that there are electives. In case of mine, I selected techonology and strings. If you don't understand, you just come and you will understand what I mean. Thanks!!!