First, at school we read a book called The Last Cuentista. The Last Cuentista was about a girl who goes on a spaceship to a different planet with lots of other people and when she wakes up, her family is gone and the space ship has a very weird way of living. Throughout the book she uses stories or cuentos to make her feel closer to home. She told the other kids on the ship stories and it made a big difference in their life and gave them something to enjoy. They eventually escaped when they landed on the planet which was very different from earth but the stories are so meaningful because they brought them together and gave them something to enjoy.
The ideal of our ideal world project was to create our own world since the book we read was about a very different world. We made paper books to show our world that included writing describing our planets. We could chose anything for our planets and we got to hand make books to show what our planets would look like on the surface. 
Lastly, we made a cuento about a story from our lives that affected us in a good or bad way. I chose for my cuento to be about my mom who came to America for college and her experience with not knowing full English in college. This story affected my life a lot because if she had not come to America I would have a very different life and I would live in Colombia. Here is my cuento:
College in America
Retold by: Soledad
I lived in Bogota, Colombia until I graduated high school. After high school, my dad wanted me to go to America for college. This was not my first choice, I hated the idea of being far from my family but we knew it was the best decision for my future. I decided to take a year as an exchange student so that I would learn more English, and it would be easier to get to know it before I live there for at least four years. I was an exchange student in Asheville, North Carolina. I was lucky enough to stay with a very kind family with a daughter my age and to this day I am still friends with their family.
After that amazing year, I went to Davidson College and that’s when the fun stopped. I loved the campus, however, my roommates alienated me. They excluded me from the rest of their group because I didn’t know perfect English. This was especially hard because my family and old friends were in Colombia so I could not talk to them about it. Since I still didn’t know perfect English it meant that I worked twice as hard and got half as far.
Even though some parts of it were challenging, there were parts I loved about Davidson. The campus was beautiful, but my favorite part of college was the amount of people I met.Not everyone excluded me and I met lots of amazing people including my husband. I also love living in North Carolina and I’m so happy here.
In my Language Arts class, we had a stock market project where we have $20,000 fake dollars to invest in 1-6 companies. We didn’t invest real money. We made cards of a stock market company and every two weeks we checked our stocks. At the last week of school we checked and who ever gained the most money got prizes. The prizes were headbands and candy. We invested in stocks based off of how well they were doing and this project showed me how quickly a company can lose lots of money and how quickly there stocks can go down.
In P.E we did a dance unit and I thought that it was really fun! In this unit we chose groups which I really liked because it was fun to spend time with my friends that were in my group. For the dance unit, we had to create a dance that lasted one minute to one of the 10 songs that were listed. Our group chose ME! By Taylor Swift because we really like the song and it is very upbeat. Our dance was really upbeat with lots of lifts and partner work. At the end, we watched every group’s dances and I was really impressed with everybody because when everyone had a chance to be creative and make their own dance up it was really interesting to see what they could come up with!
