You don't have to be perfect to fit in...

          Perfect by Natasha Friend is about a girl named Isabelle Lee who is 13 and suffers from an eating disorder. She was caught trying to make herself throw up by her little sister "Ape Face" and had to join an eating disorder and body image therapy group. An A-Ha moment that my character had was when she realized that nobody is perfect. She states in the book, "in she walked: Ashley Barnum. The Ashley Barnum...First of all, the name Ashley Barnum. Royalty, right?.. She has blue eyes, surfer girl hair, and perfect thighs... Captain of the field hockey team...voted most popular girl." She was confused on why Ashley was even in a therapy group but she later became friends with her and Isabelle realized that even the most perfect girl had her flaws.

          I feel like teens can relate to this book because they are beginning to compare themselves with these people that are what they consider perfect and they begin to start an unhealthy habit of trying to be like them but it's really only hurting themselves. Teens need to know that even those perfect people aren't so perfect and this book can teach them that.

Genocide

How and why do genocides happen? What can we do about it?

Genocides happen when a race, ethnicity, religion or basically anything that makes you who you are isn't socially accepted where you are and people want to do something to completely get rid of you. All of the groups we worked on such as Sudan and Rwanda, they people from there weren't wanted. They started going on mass killing to completely erase them out. Nobody has any tolerance for anything and that's what we need to learn. You may not like a certain race, sexuality, religion ect., but you have to learn to deal with it because it does start conflict.

Striving to find "The Body in the Woods" by April Henry

          The Body in the Woods by April Henry is a book about three characters, Alexis, Nick, and Ruby. They're all apart of a program called SAR or in other words, search and rescue. They all were called into SAR to look for an autistic man that got lost in the woods but instead, they end up finding a dead body of a teenaged girl and their mission is to find the killer but also balance their lives at home. I think that the theme in this book is to never give up. I think this because they were always striving to find more evidence even if they weren't supposed to and even if things got hard at their homes or they didn't feel like they were good enough, they still did what had to be done. Alexis always stayed with the fear of, "Was her mom asleep? Gone? With someone? Dead?" because she had a mental illness but she keeps on going in life and joins SAR to get good college applications. Ruby had to deal with her parents not wanting her to be "exposed to stuff like that in real life," because as she's in SAR, she is exposed to dead people but she fights so she could be in it. Nick want to be in the military but struggles with the fear of not being brave enough but he joins SAR to fight that fear so he can prove that he's worthy enough to join the military.

          People can relate to this because people always have other people trying to bring them down. You can't let was other people say stop you from doing something that you really love.

Adversity

          Adversity that Anne faced was trying to be the better child. She was always compared to Margot. Margot did everything right and wasn't rude and didn't disobey people.  Margot was always the better person and sometimes it kind of discouraged Anne and made her feel down. I feel like happens to me sometimes. I feel as if my older sister does everything right and I'm the bad person in some situations but you just have to get over it sometimes and look past it and see what you can do better in the future. I think that people might feel this way at least a few times in their life. 

Why people were bystanders and up standees during World War II.

           I think the reason  that many people stood by during World War II wash because they were all scared. If you even thought about standing up to the nazis or actually stood up to stop the Nazis and you were caught, you were sent to a concentration camp immediately. I think that it would've really took people a lot of courage to stand up to something like this and they would've had to really experience something to actually do something about it.  Like one story where it didn't really effect a man until he actually saw what was going on behind the walls of the concentration camp and it really effected him and he then has lots of power to do things. I think that I would've been a bystander too in this situation because I would feel as if I couldn't do anything about it and it would have to take a lot out of me to actually do something to stop it.

PR is where I will end up

          Puerto Rico is where I would want to visit. This is a small island with about 3 million people.   I've been wanting to go here for quite a while because I haven't been in a while but it's a really nice place to relax, and soak in the sun. They have really nice beaches to go to like caja de muertos and flamenco beach, Old San Juan to go to, and a lot of nice tourist attractions such as Parque Nacional Cavernas de Rio Camuy which is caves, the bioluminescent bay which is organisms that make the water glow at night, and San Juan National Historic Site which is an old fort.