Richland students in grades 4-6 are at it again, and have taken control of Inquiring Minds. You may recall from a previous post that our students have been reading Silver Birch nominated books, and that they are meeting in small groups to share and discuss life lessons they took away from their novels. The following blog entries are their summaries, connections, and reflections from those discussions.

Be prepared, they are examples of deep thinking and thought-provoking dialogue!  We invite you to join the conversation by commenting on their posts.

What if you didn’t Believe?

What would happen if you didn’t believe? In the books our group read, the message was to believe, to achieve your goals, and to never give up. If the world gave up, then society would collapse on itself like a tree in a bad storm, or a building with a bad foundation.

In every book, we had a connection of doing something that we believed and we achieving it. Believing means achieving, and the impossible is possible if you try. This belief is what keeps the life spirit going, and what keeps the world happy and hopeful. If you didn’t believe then you would never achieve, because if you didn’t believe in yourself you couldn’t accomplish anything.In the books we read, lots of the messages were to believe and to never give up. The books we read were Sinking Deeper, Missing, Tinfoil Sky, and Neil Flambé. Throughout each book there was a message to never give up and to constantly believe and never stop! This all relates back to one thing: never give up. In the end everyone agreed that you should never give up, because if no one believed… where would you be?

1 Lie = 1 Million Lies

1 lie = 1 million lies, and 1 million rights apply to everything. In our Book Club, we discussed the main points in our books and the same ideas came up. The idea of 1lie = 1 million lies was in H.K. and A.Z.’s books The Grave Robbers Apprentice and Missing. In Missing, a girl kicked over a wasp’s nest and her sister was under it and died. The girl lied to her parents that her sister went missing. In The Grave Robber’s Apprentice, the Grave Robber told his son he must do something to enter the Grand Society of Grave Robbers, but where are all the people who are in this grand society? The Grave Robber stalled by making up more lies.

However, in everyone’s books, the idea of rights came up. You have the right to a proper house and good food. You have the right to be treated the way people in higher classes get treated. Animals have rights to live, and have the same rights as people. Lastly, you have the right to tell the truth without punishment. What really stuck out to us was how deep we thought. When someone brought up rights everyone else thought deeper, and thought about other things related to rights in their book. We hope we think as deep as this in the next book club!

No Hope, No Me

I never lost hope, we never lost hope, Neil Flambé, Gwyn nor Lida lost hope. These characters all found hope and all found their way. A.T. read Neil Flambé and the character had hope because he was challenged to a food challenge, which if he won he would win 100 thousand dollars, but if he lost he would never be able to cook again. He had hope. D.S. read Dragon Seers Gift and in it the main character never gave up looking for the real dragon. In Making Bombs for Hitler, the main character had hope to find her sister.

This book club has been emotional because we found some family connections to our books. One of them was E.L.’s. Her family was from Minsk, Belarus and her family was Jewish. Her great grandmother and her family were in a concentration camp. One day big trucks came and everyone was lining up, and they saw people going in the trucks and the Nazis put gas on them. In five minutes they unloaded the trucks with dead bodies. When it was her turn it was very crowded and she hid behind a shed. She saw her family get killed. When it was dark she escaped to the forest. There she found people like her. E.L. was named in her honour. We thought it was very touching.

Martin Luther once said “Everything that is done in the world is done by hope”. We believe this because we know the world is capable of many things, but for them to be good things, we need hope.