We added our perfect planet writing to books that we made (with the help of Peg Gignoux, I’ve linked her website here: https://gignouxart.com/ )

The process to making the books wa surprisingly fun! We made colorful pages with rubber mats, paint rollers, and inks. Before that, we made the binding with hard paper (I don’t know what it’s called). We then printed out our text and glued it into the book.

Recently, my school had some visitors. they were the Chamber Theatre Production! they put on two performances: The Monkey’s Paw and The Necklace. the costumes were amazing, as well as the props.
It was so realistic! They had great voice projection. It’d take forever to describe everything they did well, so I won’t.

Each performance was amazing.

1. The Monkey’s Paw.
It has slight horror elements, but it’s not really scary. Just kinda spooky.
It is a story with the moral ‘be careful what you wish for’.
A happy family stumbles upon this monkey’s paw. they hear it can grant wishes. The family wishes for several things, and it doesn’t go as they expect.

2. The Necklace.
This is a lighter story about how this woman lived with little money, just enough to get by. She dreams of palaces and riches and luxury. She has a rich friend and must borrow a necklace from her for a ball she and her husband were invited to.

Overall, this performance was amazing! If you have time, maybe try recommending the Chamber Theatre Production to your school!

Photo by my LA teacher

Recently, an astronaut named Colonel Virts visited our school. He talked about how takeoff felt, when he was in the rocket, and how he became an astronaut. He mentioned his book The Astronaut’s Guide to Leaving the Planet.

Photo by my LA teacher

We met in our theatre/meeting hall to see his presentation.

My school has a system for different school days. We have day 1Cs, day 2Cs, day 3Cs, day 1As, day 2As, and day 3As. The only difference is the day threes. Day 3Cs, we have Community Meeting. We meet in our meeting hall and watch a bunch of presentations, and sometimes performances. On day 3As, we have advisory period during the hour we’d have Community Meeting. During advisory period, we usually do activities in a book about mindfulness for 40 minutes, then go outside.

Anyway, having Col. Virts was extremely fun and inspiring. I always like having guest visitors at my school.

In Language Arts we read the book The Last Cuentista by Barba Higuera. In the book, the main character, Petra is determined to become a storyteller. She believes that ‘cuentos’ are the most important thing in the world. My teachers asked us to share a story that has been important in our lives. Here is one I want to share:

There was a stubborn, old, grumpy man who lived in an old town. He refused to try new things.
One day, a young and hyper man came to the grump’s house and knocked on the door with a platter in his hands. The platter smelled foul, but the young man insisted the food was delicious.
The grump opened the door and smelled the ‘delicious food’, and an upsetting look washed over his face. “Who are you and why do you have that foul-smelling dish with you?” He asked.
“Hello, Sir! Would you like to try my blue chicken and waffles? They’re delicious; I promise you.” The young man said cheerfully, waving the dish around, threatening to drop it unintentionally.
“No way! Anything that smells like that is sure to be as bad as its odor. Good day.” The man replied before slamming the door in the young man’s face.
“How rude. But he must see how delicious my dish is, and he should learn to have the courage to try new things.” The young man insisted, knocking on the door again.
The old man opened it once again and sighed, raising his eyebrow. “I’m not trying your garbage.”
“Aww, come on. They’re really good.” The young man replied sadly. When the old man didn’t say anything, it was the young man’s turn to sigh. “Fine, I’ll do it myself.” And poked the old man.
A few seconds later, they both found themselves in a vast forest. The old man’s eyes widened with fright. “Where is this place? What happened? Who even are you?”
The young man shushed his companion and started to speak in an ominous voice. “Would you eat my dish in the woods?”
“No.” The old man replied flatly.
The scenery changed again, and they appeared to be in a small town. “Would you eat it with people around?”
“No!” The old man replied again.
Next, they were on a roller coaster. This went on for a while, until the old man finally broke.
“Fine! If I eat your dish, will you leave me alone and bring me home?”
“Yes.”
The old man sighed and took a bite out of the young man’s dish. In an instant, an amazed look came over the man’s face, for the dish really was delicious. “Wow, this is delicious.”
“I know! You just had to give it a chance,” the young man replied joyfully.

For a class project (language arts), we are doing a stock market project. Each person (or each group, if you pair up) gets 20,000 HYPOTHETICAL dollars to invest in the stock market.
Each group/person chooses what they invest in and how much they invest in each company. You HAVE to get as close to $20,000 in the market as possible, though.
I’m not doing so well with mine, I’m down $626 currently. We update the bulletin board every week. The bulletin board has everyone’s company logos and names. My company name has my last name in it, so I blurred it out.

I don’t really know why I chose the companies I did, but they’re not doing great. I think I thought that if they were green, they would probably stay green, which was not very smart of me. I predict that, in the future, my stocks will go down even more. Not complaining, as long as I get candy.
I do care, that was a joke. I promise. But, I do hope my stocks won’t be in the negatives in the close future.

Another fun add-on! The 3 biggest winners get a piece of candy, and the 2 biggest losers get a piece of candy.

The inspiration for this project comes from an amazing mystery book you may have heard of called The Westing Game. It is aimed at maybe young adult/older child audiences. It is very entertaining. 10/10, would recommend.

We made spreadsheets to keep track of our stocks. It turned out to be very useful! They’re very easy to use. One of our teachers helped with making them, since some people didn’t know how to use formulas and stuff. It’s easy once you get the hang of it.

Anyway, I’ve put a picture/screenshot down below of my spreadsheet for my stocks and my company logo.

Manny was a butterfly fish. He loved to swim in and out of the coral he lived in. He had two best friends: Margaret and George. They would always play hide-and-seek-tag together all day, only ever stopping to eat when they got hungry.
One day, Margaret didn’t show up for hide-and- seek-tag. Manny and George waited for hours, but she never came. Eventually, they ended up playing without her.
For days and days, she never showed up. Until a few weeks later, she came up to them with a panicked look on her face.
“You’ve got to help me! I’ve made a grave mistake!” Margaret yelled, breathing heavily. “Please,”
Manny and George rushed toward her, happy that she came back. “Where have you been? We missed you,” they said, hugging their dear friend.
After a few moments, she collected herself and replied: “I accidentally set off a trap and killed my mother. She was so young!” She sobbed, covering her face with her fins.
“Oh my gosh, no! She has all the good snacks!” George shrieked, sobbing along with Margaret.
“Haha, my mom is still alive and is going to take your dead mom’s snacks. Then she’ll have the best!”

The End.

Not too long ago, my grade went to the Museum of Natural Life and Sciences in Raleigh. The bus ride was 20-30 minutes long, so not too bad.
There are 9 advisories in my grade, so we split up into 3 groups of 2 and 1 group of 3 advisories. My favorite section was the area with all the forest animals and plants. It has several layers, and I liked the bottom one best.
We all went out to the big pathway in the middle of all the buildings to eat lunch, where we could all just chat. Overall, it was a great trip and if you have students, you should take them there.
They had a ton of dinosaurs there, too. There was this one room with a ton of sculptures of dinosaurs, and it had fake pterodactyls hanging on an spinning fan thing. It was really cool.
They had a ton of animals in a bunch of sections, and my favorite were the reptiles. I think snakes are really cool.
There was a room with a bunch of 3D printers and printed items. They had some chain mail like thing that they let us play with.
I think the area my teachers wanted us to look at the most was the ‘What Is Race?’ section. I know because they did a short talk on it before leaving, and they had us do a little survey. I included some pictures form the trip below. Enjoy!

For this post, I’m going to talk about a budget project I did in my math class. This was probably one of the most enjoyable projects I’ll do this year. You had to choose an occupation and a place to live, etc. and based on the money you get from that job, plan a life. I really enjoyed it. I’ve included a picture of mine.

This is a project that I’m doing in LA, called a Perfect World. We are reading a book in Language Arts called The Last Cuentista. The main character has to leave Earth and live on a different planet. So our teacher asked us to create a perfect planet to live on if we couldn’t live on Earth. Here’s mine!

Plants: There is a lot of variety for the plants on Jyoti. Barely any are poisonous, much less deadly. The most common plant for gardens and lawns is the Zilla flower. The color of its petals can be just about any warm color, and they represent peace and happiness.

Water: The water is clear blue (see: Hawaii beaches) and the currents are a bit slower than Earth’s. The temperature depends on where the water is, but it can usually be found being refreshingly cool, around 78ºF.

Rocks: The rocks are all white-ish in color, like marble. They are smooth to the touch, and have a satisfying sound when banged together.

Air: The air is breathable. It’s very translucent.

Sky/Moons: Jyoti has two moons. One named Ese and the other named Agrippa. Their orbits are almost identical, but Ese is behind Agrippa.

Animals/Nature: The animal selection is almost identical to Earth’s, but without mosquitoes. People respect cats more than any other animal, but this is normal. It is believed that if you can afford it, you should own a cat as a sign of respect for housing cats that could have been living on the streets. Even if you can but choose not to, there is no punishment, but it will most likely be judged.

Societies and how everyone gets along: There is a council called The Passang. They must go through years of trials and tests to prove they are worthy of being in charge of Jyoti. The Passang are in charge of most of the decisions made on Jyoti. There are five Passang in total. 50 trainees are always being trained to replace a Passang when they die, but only one is chosen.

Everyone is kind and fair to each other, with the punishment of being rude as a second ethics course for anyone past 5th grade, a scolding for anyone under 5th grade, and a reset on the course for anyone in 5th grade.

Extra Stuff: Every child starts school when they are five years old. They mainly focus on the typical kindergarten stuff: numbers and reading, etc. In 5th grade, they start focusing on ethics with the occasional educational class so they don’t forget anything. They return back to educational stuff in middle school (6th grade).

Jyoti is roughly the size of Neptune.

The currency used on Jyoti is called Pua. One Pua is worth five US dollars.

The society and buildings are modern, but not ‘futuristic’. The most common living style is the suburbs, but there are also cities and countrysides as well, along with other housing options. The technology is very similar to Earth’s, so not too modern.

Hello again! I have no ideas for anything else, so I’m just here to blabber on about GI. Again.

I got to Inazuma–a while ago, actually–and I’m currently at Ar 45. I’ve finished the Sumeru archon quest. There was SO MUCH DIALOGUE. Even in the domains. Honestly, I just skipped it all, but it still took around 10 minutes to finish one conversation.

Is it just me, or is Dehya really annoying? She has a bunch of different personalities. For example: overprotective of Dunyarzad, irresponsible when dealing with the Eremites, careless, etc. Her character is fine, she just irritates me.

I like the drama that Alhaitham gets with Cyno and Kaveh. It’s amusing to watch, but Cyno and Alhaitham have learned to trust each other a bit. That’s what I think at least.

The whole quest felt very rushed and boring.