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.