This time, I’m writing to talk about this book project we did in LA. Remember the perfect planet project? Well, this is like a sequel to that. This time, with the help of Peg Gignoux (more on her later), we were able to create a 3-D version of our perfect planet. This book has a window in it, allowing you to see inside of the book, and what your perfect planet would look like. You would be able to decorate the inside and the outside of the books using specially crafted paper. 

Peg Gignoux, is a well-known artist in America. She has worked with Durham Academy for years to help make this project. Mrs. Gignoux taught all the LA classes how to create incredible paper designs.  

To make the paper designs, we had a special paint/ink to decorate it with. Using a gel pad and a paint roller, you would add drops of paint onto the gel pad, then roll it out so that it is even and covers the whole pad. Then, you can add your choice of leaf, flower, or plant parts onto the gel pad. After that, stick the piece of paper over it and using the same paint roller, roll it out so the ink gets stuck on the piece of paper. After peeling it off, you should get an imprint of the object you chose, on a background of your paints.  

After creating the paper designs, we started making the book. Mrs. Gignoux taught us how to fold, cut, and glue the paper together so that we would be able to create a pocket like place in the book. Then, using the paper designs you made, you would cut them out into shapes to create your perfect planet. After finishing your planet, you would cut out the little window in the book so you were able to create a hole to peek in your planet with. After that is all done, you would finish gluing the covers on and the pages together to finish your book. Lastly, you cut out the name of your planet to glue to the cover.

 

 

 

Police often use fingerprints from crimes scenes to find the culprit. Each person has their own unique one. Not even identical twins have the same prints! 

In LA, we did a fingerprint project where we took a pencil, and colored it on a piece of paper so that the graphite was like dust. Then, we took our finger and pressed it on the paper. After that, we took a piece of tape and stuck it to our fingers and removed it, which resulted in our finger prints getting stuck on the tape. We were to do one of every finger of each hand. 

Finger prints are formed when the skin of the finger grows at different speeds. Together, they tug and twist to form the print. Thus, finger prints are made from different layers of skin twisted together. 

Below are some cool facts about finger prints 

1. Some people are born without them. There are three genetic problems that stop finger prints from forming. 
2. The finger prints of koalas are so like those of human. Scientists have even had trouble differentiating them. 
3. You can lose your pinger prints. Some rough treatments, such as chemotherapy can result in the loss of your finger prints. 
4. No two fingerprints are the same. Even though there are the main categories of fingerprints, each print has their own unique ridges on them. 
5. Finger prints help us grip objects. The small ridges of the skin help keep objects in place and unmoving when we reach to grab them. 
6. Your finger prints develop very early in life. Your prints were likely formed around the 3-month gestation month. It is believed that the environment of the womb shapes the finger prints. 
7. Finger prints were used as early as the time of early Babylonians. It is said that they encase their prints on clay to seal business deal. 
8. Cops use finger prints in more ways than one. The most common way finger prints are used is to solve a crime. However, cops also ‘mark’ every car they pull over in case something bad happens. 

 

 

 

To learn more, go to: 

healthresearchfunding 

kidadl 

mentalfloss 

A few days ago, I just read this book called When. This book is about a girl, Maddie, who sees a unique string of letters above each person’s head. However, those numbers mean something really important; they are the death dates of that person.

Following the premature death of her father, her mother starts drinking. Maddie uses her powers to make money. She tells her clients the death dates of them, or their loved ones.

One day, a woman comes to her, asking her to read the death date of her young daughter who has cancer. When Maddie tells her that her daughter would live for much longer, she seems to relax. However, she catches her eye of her teenage son. His death date was next week. Maddie tries to warn her but the woman seems to think that she is lying. The woman threatens to call the police on her. Scared that the police would discover that her mother drinks, she stops trying to convince.

Then, on the day the woman’s son was suppose to die, he goes missing and later shows of beaten severely and dead. Law enforcements turn to Maddie. As the prime suspect to the murder of the client’s son, and other people that suddenly go missing and turn up dead, Maddie has to prove herself innocent. As the murderer draws nearer, she finds out that she may be next.

 

A while ago, we had a group of college-aged actors come to our school and perform a few plays. The is group was called Chamber Theater. The 5th and 6th grade got to see two of the plays that they performed.

The first play was called Monkey’s Paw. It is about this person, who found an enchanted trinket. It was the monkey’s paw. The monkey’s paw had the power to grant three wished to someone, however, there was a catch.

This person gave the monkey’s paw to a family of three. The father was greedy, and wished for money. However, when their son went to work one day, they got a message delivered that he had been crushed in machinery. To offer compensation, the person wanted to give the mourning parents 60 shillings. This is exactly what the father had wished for the night before.

The mother desperately wanted her son back, so she then took the monkey’s paw and wished for her son to be alive. However, this meant that she had brought him back alive when he was being crushed. When she heard his yells, she once again took the monkey’s paw and wished for him to be at peace.

Overall, Chamber Theater did a great job of acting. They were only in college, yet they were able to mimic the older people in the plays really well. Applauds to them.

 

 

In LA, we were working on creating our own stories. It could’ve been on that someone in your family told you, or a story you loved to read as a kid. I chose to retell a story of one of my favorite picture books. You can read it below.

 

The Bug Book

Growing up, I had this one book that I really liked. I cannot remember the title of it, but I know for certain it was about a bug. 

When I was first learning how to read, I really liked to practice using the bug book. Before my mom even taught me to read, I was able to read a few pages of the book.

This book was about a bug, who was different from the other bugs shown. He has googly eyes, small legs, uneven wings, and all sorts of mismatched colors along his body. This bug, we can call him George, was jealous of all the other bugs. The other insects were pretty, and had special features about them. The green bug was skinny, and could hide between blades of grass to protect from predators. The red bug was small, and was hard for predators to spot. And lastly, the purple bug had perfect wings to fly away with.

George was jealous of all of the other bugs. He couldn’t do anything. He had no special abilities. He felt like a fish out of water. One day, he tried to copy all the other bugs, he attached some grass to his torso, made wings from flower petals, and tried to make himself as small as he could. 

Just then, a large, red, bird flew overhead. George tried to hide between blades of grass and made himself as small as possible. When the bird spotted him, George tried to flap his flower petal wings. However, that made him look even more tasty to the bird. That’s when George had enough. He burst out from his costume, and screamed at the creature. That gave the bird a huge fright. It flew away. That’s when George realized he had his own defense mechanism: looking different and somewhat creepy. 

After that, he embraced himself, and eventually found a family and had a dozen kids.

 

A while ago, an astronaut, Colonel Terry Virts, came to our school. He talked about what it was like in space, the things he did, and how he became an astronaut.

Before he was an astronaut, Col. Virts was in the U.S. Air Force. While he was in space, he took over 30,000 pictures – more than any took during a space mission! He walked us through the steps you needed to do in order to become an astronaut, and even showed us some videos. According to him, he is a fraction of a second younger than he would be because of the effect being an astronaut had on him.

Here is a photo of him.

To learn more, visit his website: https://www.terryvirts.com/

The book, The Westing Game is what we are currently reading in LA. The book is about a murder. There are a group of people selected to play a certain game. They want to uncover who the murderer is and at the end, the winner wins about 200 million dollar. They are separated into partners and each given a set of clues. One of the characters, Turtle Wexler, thinks that the clues are telling her to invest money in the stock market. Thus, we are doing a stock market project.

We were each given 20,000 dollars worth of fake money. We had to invest in up to six different companies. At the end of the school year, the person with the most amount of money wins a prize.

I chose to invest in Disney, Netflix, Chipotle, T-Mobile, and Starbucks. I am almost certain that Chipotle will keep going up at a steady rate, while the others just kind of bounce back and forth. My only goal is not to lose any money.

To track how well our stocks are doing, we set off a spread sheet that automatically calculates our data. All we have to do is enter the current stock prices into the correct grid, and update the dates.

Below is a picture of my spread sheet and my company logo.

Last week (At least since I was writing this), we went to a museum called the N.C. Museum of Sciences. We were split up into different groups to go explore the four floors of the museum.

The first floor that my group went to was the very top one, the fourth floor. From there, we went to the Racism exhibit. We were tasked with a writing project on the exhibit. Once we were done with the writing, we were allowed to go to the Women in Science exhibit.

I don’t remember what we did next, but I do remember going to the dinosaur exhibit. In the place where the dinosaurs are showcased, it’s a big dome like room, with flying dinosaurs such as Pterodactyls hanging from the ceiling,  as well as a T-Rex like Dino chasing a brachiosaurus around the room. However, I remember that when I was there years ago, there was a tv in the room that showed a video of the T-rex like dinosaur chasing the brachiosaurus.

We went around the museum and saw other exhibits, such as a 3-d printing place, natural habitats of animals, and a space exhibit.

 

 

I think my favorite part of the museum was the natural habitats of the animals because there were live creature such as fish, frogs, and insects that we could see. They also had a lot of models of the habitats of the animals along with models of the animals themselves.

Overall, our time at the museum was really fun. I enjoyed seeing all the different things that were presented in there.

In science, we have been learning about heat transfer. For our ending project, we were to create a heat shield for our ‘eggstronauts’. Our goal was to create something that could withstand the heat of a blowtorch for three whole minutes, with a egg on the other side. It had to be completely raw in order to pass. Our egg was to be place touching the side of the heat shield that was not being blasted by the torch.

We were placed in groups of three to work together and build the shield. I was in a group with Brandon and Emmanuel. We each had separate jobs. Mine was the all star analyst. I was supposed to keep track of all our data from tests.

At the end, we ended up using spackle between two lasagna pieces with another layer of spackle. On the very outside, we layered aluminum foil.

When we tested our prototype. It was able to withstand the heat of a blowtorch (2000 degrees Celsius) for three minutes. Our egg was completely raw. We had completed our task. However, our heat shield was a bit heavy, it was supposed to be under 45 grams, and ours just barely passed with 41.30 grams.

 

Chapter 3

June was in the middle of a panic attack. She just had a nightmare about her parents. You see, since the age of six, June has been traumatized. 

Flashback around eleven years ago:

It had been a wonderful day. June and her parents, Maya and Lou, were at the beach, celebrating June’s birthday, and enjoying the late summer evening. 

Suddenly, two gunshots rang out into the air. People were scrambling and screaming about. Desperately trying to escape the nightmare. June and her parents were in the middle of it. Her parents trying to shield her from any harm. 

Then one moment, June’s dad dropped to the ground. Her mother screamed. There, right in the middle of his chest, was a bullet wound. June was terrified. How could someone be so cruel, murdering people on a perfect day?

June looked on in shock as her mother dropped to her knees and ripped off a piece of her dress, wrapping it tightly around June’s dad. However, this didn’t stop the bleeding. 

The last words she heard her dad mutter before he died was, “Take care of June please. Protect her from anything. Remember, I love you both.” 

Watching her dad pass right in front of them was horrifying. June could no longer hear the screaming and shouting of people, the sirens from ambulances and police cars, or her own mothers sobbing. Her ears were blocked. Unable to register anything at the moment. 

Suddenly, June felt a sharp pain in her leg. She looked down and saw blood gushing out of her thigh. Black dots danced in front of her eyes. All the noise slowly faded from her ears. June could faintly hear her mom shouting her name as she collapsed
down 

                                                                         down

                                                                                                  down onto the sand.

 

Years had passed since that horrid day at the beach. June was still coping from the loss of her father even now, eleven years later. 

Her mother had told her how lucky she was to have survived the bullet. It had completely gone though her thigh.

Maya often recounted how scared she was the moment June had collapsed on the sand. She had just lost her husband. And now she was going to lose her daughter too. All in one day.

Then a miracle happened, a paramedic appeared right in front of her. After that, Maya often told June, was just a blur. All she remembered was riding in the back of an ambulance with the body of Ray and an unconscious June. 

When June had finally woken up from a medical coma, days had already passed. You could imagine the relief Maya felt when she heard her six year old daughter was awake and alive after days of stressful waiting.

Breathe. In through your nose, and out through your mouth. June reminded herself. It wasn’t that day. They weren’t on the beach. She was safe in her bedroom.

Slowly, June’s ragged breathing went back to normal.

Starting a day with a panic attack isn’t good. She thought to herself.

The panic attacks started when she was about nine years old. The first time it happened, it was when they went back to that same beach where her father had gotten killed. 

After that, they got more and more frequent, up to the point where she would have them several times a day. June had started going to a therapist when she was twelve. It helped a lot and she rarely had any panic attacks now. However, it would still happen from time to time.

After June had calmed down, she got out of bed and went to the bathroom to brush her teeth. 

When she walked in, her eyes went wide. The mirror in front of her was blank. It had no reflection. June looked back at herself, she could clearly see her own body, so why wasn’t it reflected onto the mirror?

June felt her breath speeding up again.

No. She thought, Not again. One panic attack is enough for a day. I don’t need another one.

June took a deep breath in, and exhaled. Her breathing calmed back down. When she looked into the mirror, she could see her pale, tear stained face, and frail skinny body slowly fading into view. Once her reflection was clear, she shook her head. 

It must’ve been my head messing with me. I mean, maybe it was just the lack of oxygen from my attack. Or I was hallucinating. There’s no way I can turn invisible. June thought.

After changing out of her pajamas and brushing her teeth, June went downstairs to find a plate of breakfast on the table. Next to it, was a note. 

Good morning sweetheart. I had to leave early for a work meeting. I made you breakfast. Have a nice day at school.

 

                                                          Xoxo Mom

 

The note said. June sighed, she had wanted to talk to her mom about a class project for history she had to do. 

 

Oh well. She thought. I’ll ask her when she gets back.

 

To be continued……