Reading Standards for Literature 6–12

This week we worked with Patty to finish our donation letter. She helped us make it look more professional by adding the school logo and the name in fancy letters in other words we included a header. We also searched businesses that donate to a non-profit organizations. We figured out that Smart and Final donates to schools and has done so for our school in the past with FFA. We also found out that we can apply to a donation request online so we made an account.

English Standard:

3. Analyze how complex characters (e.g., those with multiple or conflicting
motivations) develop over the course of a text, interact with other characters,
and advance the plot or develop the theme.

I have also been reading the book "In Cold Blood", I have read Part 3 this week. The main characters Dick and Perry develop new characteristics over the course of the story or more specifically throughout part 3. They are at the point where the detectives are getting closer to catching both of them. The detectives already know that Dick and Perry were the ones who committed the crime due to the living "witness" also known as Floyd Wells, a past cell buddy of Dick's, who confessed that he was the one who told Dick of the Clutter family and their supposedly safe.

Before they were caught and arrested Dick was portrayed as "hard-rock, pragmatic, virile, a real brass boy." Just alone with his actions proved that he was a real murderer with no feelings of any kind. How he would run over dogs and smash them just for the hell of it and would only laugh at the sight and feel no consideration or pity what so ever. Or how he had continuously told Perry that they didn't need no masks because they were not going to leave a single witness alive. But these characteristics were only a mere cover up of how Dick really was for he'd proven to be "pretty weak, shallow, and a coward." When they arrested both Dick and Perry, they were separated into different rooms to be interrogated and with the pressure of the questions being asked Dick put all the blame on Perry and made him self look like the victim as well.

Perry on the other had showed to be the complete opposite of how he was described throughout the story. In part three, Perry reveals himself as not that sensitive but rather tough for a guy like himself. Before the murder the reader can only assume that tucking in the dead victims and doing such things as putting a pillow as to make them more comfortable would only be something that Perry would do. But after they were arrested Perry confessed when they told him that Dick blamed him for all the murders and said that he was a " natural born killer" and said that that was not true and that he killed Mr.Clutter and Kenyon while Dick killed Nancy and Mrs. Clutter. Something that the reader wouldn't have expected Perry to do.