Avalon, Web of Magic by Rachel Roberts

This book was about a girl named Kara who is a mage, which is a magical person. There are many magical creatures in the book, such as my favorite, a unicorn. There are two other mages who are her friends their names are Emily and Adriane. They're all friends but, Adrianne can sometimes be a little mean to Kara. Kara is the blazing star, Adrianne is the warrior, and Emily is the healer of the mage group. These are the three different mages. They are very powerful all together as mages with magic.

Unicorns

Unicorns are one of my favorite things. They come in all different colors, shapes, and sizes of course. I like this picture because it has a pink unicorn with a rainbow mane and tail, which I especially like. My favorite thing about unicorns is that they have a horn. That's it for today. Thank you.

Book Review: Sassy the Birthday Storm

Name of book: Sassy the Birthday Storm

Author: Sharon M. Draper

I liked this book: some

This book was: fiction



What happened in the story: Sassy goes to her grandma's house in Florida to celebrate her grammy's birthday party. The birthday party gets canceled because a hurricane is coming. So they prepare for it. And after the hurricane Sassy cleans up the beach.



What is the theme of the book? In my opinion, the theme of the book is sometimes things don't go as expected. When things don't go as anticipated you should make the best of it.

How this story relates to or reminds me of something in my own life: The story relates to me because in the story the sky was really dark when Sassy looked up. When I was in Florida I saw a dark sky.



Three new words I learned while reading this book and writing this book review:
(1) clumping - making a heavy, dull sound
(2) tropical depression - when lowered pressure is at the center of a group of thunderstorms
(3) dreary - boring, dull, dismal, causing unhappiness

Pick one of your new words: dreary

Look it up in the thesaurus. List words that have a similar meaning and define them.

(1) Similar word: Blah - worthless, nonsense, drivel
(2) Similar word: Boring - not interesting, tiresome, dull
(3) Similar word: Colorless - lacking color, weak in color, lacking animation or variety
(4) Similar word: Humdrum - lacking variety or excitement, dull

Famous Woman Scientist: Marie Curie

Assignment: Pick a famous woman scientist. Describe her early scientific life, her major contributions to science, and why her work is relevant today.

Scientist chosen: Marie Curie

She was a scientist. In 1867 she was born in Warsaw, Poland. She came up with the word radioactivity. She was not accepted to many universities because she was from Poland and there were a lot of people who didn’t like the Polish. So she went to the Sorbonne in Paris to study and married Pierre Curie. At the Sorbonne, she was the first woman professor.



Marie was experimenting with atoms. The middle of the atom breaks down and little waves shoot off. This is called radioactivity. She discovered radium and polonium which are two elements of the periodic table. She came up with polonium by naming it after Poland where she lived.



In 1903, Marie won the Nobel Prize for physics for the discovery of radioactivity. In 1911, she won another Nobel Prize for chemistry. She died in 1934 because of leukemia that she got by experimenting with radium.




Her work is relevant today because we use things with radium in them. For example, glow in the dark watches and x-rays use radium. X-rays are used for examining broken bones at the doctor’s office.

Sources: Brainpop.com, and the book Marie Curie, A Photographic Story of a Life by Vicki Cobb.

Agatha Christie: Essay Submission for "Above and Beyond"

Who was Agatha Christie? What did she contribute? Give specific examples of her work. How is her work still important today?

She was a writer. She wrote plays. The plays were about mysteries. One of the plays was called Mousetrap. I saw a performance of Mousetrap at Wardlaw-Hartridge. The actors were kids from Wardlaw-Hartridge school. It was about a bunch of people who were invited to a guesthouse and a bad guy showed up and pretended to be a detective. Then somebody got murdered. The pretend detective was the murderer, because the people he lived with abused him. So he killed his foster mom, and Mrs. Boyle who was the judge who sent him there. He tried to kill his former teacher, Ms. Waring, because she found out too late and didn’t stop the abuse.


Agatha Christie also wrote short stories and novels. Murder on the Orient Express and And Then There Were None were two novels. The Orient Express is similar to Mousetrap because the train got stuck in the snow and there was a murder. Also, the people got stuck in the house and there was a murder in the play Mousetrap. And Then There Were None is similar because people were invited to a house and got murdered. A story by Agatha Christie’s mother “Mrs. Jordan’s Ghost” is similar because her ghost shows up every time a piece of music in played, and in Mousetrap the bad guy showed up when a piece of music was played and it was “Three blind mice.”


Agatha grew up in Torquay, England in the 1890s. She got inspired by her mother because she told her mystery stories.

Sources consulted: Brainpop.com; and Agatha Christie, Writer of Mystery book by Carol Dommermuth-Costa.

Writing about Peace

Mika wrote this essay for a school essay writing contest about the meaning of peace.

Peace is when people don't fight or hurt each other. Peace can be between people or world nations. Without peace we would have a lot of wars and a lot of people would die because of war. Nations resolve their differences by going to an organization called the United Nations and they bring together diplomats from all the nations around the world. They have a big meeting, they try to solve problems peacefully.


Two great leaders who peacefully protested for change were Mahatma Gandhi in India and South Africa and Martin Luther King Jr. Gandhi wanted India to be free from the British. He organized a march to get salt because he didn't like the British salt tax and didn't want to pay.

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lived in Montgomery, Alabama in the 1950s. He stopped segregation and believed in peace, not violence and had bus boycots. He earned the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. Martin got inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and he got inspired by how Mahatma Gandhi did things peacefully, not violently.

Sources consulted:
(1) Brainpop.com
(2) Martin Luther King Jr. by Amy Pastan

My review of Zodiac Girls, Brat Princess

I have been reading the story Zodiac Girls, Brat Princess. It is by Cathy Hopkins. The story is about a girl who doesn't behave well. And she is very rich. The main character is a girl named Lenora Hedly Dent. So far Lenora was taking a trip to Paris with her friend, but instead she got sent to boot camp. So when she got there, she met a couple of people who said they were were planets. She met a guy named Mr. O, and she also met Hermie, Selene and Mario, who are her guardians. On the first night at boot camp, she is asked to hand over her jewelery but she doesn't want to.

Where I am at in the book now is that Lenora just watched a video of her sister, Poppy, who died. Lenora felt sad about that. Lenora might be bratty because her sister died, and Lenora got very sad because she loved her sister.

By the end of the book, I think Lenora will be better behaved because her guardians are teaching her lessons (ex: give presents to sick people at the hospital so they can feel better). Then maybe her parents won't send her to boot camp again.

The book reminds me of the time I threw a tantrum at the toy store when my mom wouldn't let me get a toy. We were looking for presents for my friend's birthday party, and my birthday was coming up. So my mom wouldn't let me get anything big, because if I did I wouldn't have a lot of choices left for toys that were big for my birthday.

Lenora kind of reminds me of a TV show character Candace on Phineas and Ferb, because she was being a little snobby to Isabella, another girl from the same TV show.