Movement Class

 

My movement teacher, Mrs. Norkus

In my school, I am currently taking a fine art called Movement. Movement is a great class that helps me relax and increases my spatial awareness. One of my favorite parts of movement is when we take a walkabout. We usually take walkabouts when the weather is nice and when movement is the last class of the day. During a walkabout, we walk outside and do stretches. After we do all our stretches, we use the remaining time to play on the playground. I like walkabouts because it refreshes my brain after a long day of school. 

Another thing I enjoy about movement is when we play wax museum. In wax museum, one person is the night guard and everyone else are statues. The night guard tries to catch the statues moving while the statues try to move without being caught. When we play wax museum, we have to be aware of where the night guard is and which way they are facing. Wax museum is a fun game to play that increases our perception of the world. 

Overall, movement is one of the best fine arts that I have taken. It makes me more sure of my body and is an energizing break from school work.  



My Ideal World

The Matrix

If you could design a planet, what would it look like? My planet would be called The Matrix. Some of its physical features would include floating islands, three moons, and tall mountains. The floating islands would be more like very small moons than actual islands. They would orbit around my planet at about the same speed that the planet spins at. This would cause them to appear stationary relative to the planet. The islands would be filled with futuristic skyscrapers and glass sky bridges would connect the islands together. My planet, The Matrix, would also have three moons. These would appear brightly in the night sky. Two out of the three moons were colonized by humans. The third moon would be an inhospitable piece of fiery rock with average temperatures of 2350 – 2400 degrees fahrenheit. This is due to a massive runaway greenhouse effect. The last distinct physical feature that my planet has is towering mountains. Their peaks would disappear into the sky and be covered in snow. Beautiful waterfalls would cascade off the sides of these mountains. The waterfalls would be located low enough in altitude that they wouldn’t freeze. These waterfalls would be the main way that humans get fresh water. Those would be the three physical features that my planet has.

My planet also has many diverse animals. These include birds that put on aerial shows when they migrate, and bugs that produce a sticky substance much like concrete. The birds are known as Cherpers. Their name is a combination between cheer and chirp. The cheer is because the birds look like cheerleaders when they perform aerial shows. The chirp is the sound that they make while they perform. Cherpers are easily trained and are commonly used to support sport teams. They are also a popular form of entertainment for young children to watch. The bugs are called Vivis. They secrete a concrete-like concoction to build their homes. Humans utilize them to construct soaring skyscrapers. However, their concrete is very expensive. Therefore, their concrete is only used to build very important buildings. The one thing that my planet would positively not have would be mosquitoes. Anything that produces itchy and annoying bites for humans would either have been eradicated or would have gone extinct due to natural causes. If anything like a mosquito is ever discovered, a state of emergency would be declared. The world would scramble to eradicate the new pest.

Those would be the signature animals that my planet, The Matrix, would have.

The Matrix has highly advanced technology. The most recent and interesting invention is interstellar travel. In the late 35th century, the most brilliant people on Matrix were all racing to create a ship that could achieve interstellar travel. This race was much like the space race on Earth. Interstellar travel was eventually invented by an engineer named Robert Travowski. The interstellar engine allowed people on Matrix to travel to almost anywhere in the universe in a matter of seconds. Today, interstellar travel is almost taken for granted and people commonly use it to go on vacations to other galaxies.

 

My planet would have a unique education system. The education from preschool to 5th grade would be very similar to the education system on Earth. After 5th grade, children would be educated by a system called Apprenticeships. Children would get to choose one or two particular subjects to excel in. If they are unsure what subject to choose, there would be an option where kids learn a bit of everything. Children who do choose one or two subjects to devote their time to would be taught by experts in the field. For example, if a child wanted to learn science, they would be taught by an experienced scientist who had worked in the field before. Once students have reached high school, they can choose a few subcategories of main subjects that they would really like to shine in. For example, if a student was learning about science, once they enter high school, they may choose to focus on archeology. Students would still be taught by professionals in the field. After students graduated from college, they would have the option to continue their education through graduate school. Graduate school would function similarly to how graduate school works on Earth. All education would be free, because the government would pay the school. That would be the education system of The Matrix.

Those are the main unique features of The Matrix. I believe that it would function well and that it would be fun to live there. What do you think? What would be your ideal world?

 

My Field Trip

Last week, my class went on a field trip to The Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, North Carolina. The buses we rode on were holiday travel buses. They had plushy seats and were very tall. The other cars looked like cookie crumbs! Once we got there, the first thing we saw was the skeleton of a blue whale. The jaw of it was the size of a car! After that, we went up an escalator and saw a pool of fishes. It happened to be the exact time that the museum staff were feeding the fish. We watched as the museum staff would put pieces of food on long metal sticks and slowly lower them into the water. The fish would swim up and snap the food off the stick in a very sudden motion. It was so fast, you could hardly see it! 

Next, we went to an exhibit on climate change. There were many interactive models that we could play with to help us understand how humans were damaging the environment and how we could help fix it. We then walked to an animal exhibit. There was a miniature model forest with animals hidden around it. They were hiding in between the leaves and camouflaged in the ground. The longer you looked, the more you saw! Then, we gaped at the colossal dinosaur exhibit. Their heads soared into the sky! It was amazing that such a large animal could ever have walked the Earth. 

Penultimately, we had lunch outside. I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Finally, we went back inside to an eye-opening RACE exhibit. There were many beautiful and informative posters. They combined color and words to make a spectacular and captivating billboard. One thing that I learned from that exhibit was medical racism. I hadn’t been aware of medical racism before I went to that exhibit. Overall, the race exhibit enhanced my knowledge on the topic and gave me useful tips on how to stop racism in the future. 

After that, we left the museum. The experience was quite enjoyable and educational for me. I got to see live animals eating and living in their natural habitat. I saw models of ancient dinosaurs and skeletons of massive blue whales. I would recommend the Museum of Natural Sciences to anyone who loves nature and science. 

My Current Book

Credit for image: Sora

This January I started reading a book called The False Prince. I have loved it so far because its plot is captivating and suspenseful. An orphan called Sage and two other orphans are bought by a wealthy noble for a mysterious reason. The False Prince was written by Jennifer A. Nielsen. It is the first book in a quartet. I picked up this book because it was one of the five books my librarian recommended to my class. I had already read the first four and had thoroughly enjoyed them, so naturally I read this book as well.

In my language arts class, we were discussing window and mirror books. A window book is about a story that you do not relate to. A mirror book is about a story that you can relate to. This book is a window book for me because I am not an orphan and I am not living in a medieval time period. One interesting thing that I notice is that I typically read window books and not mirror books. This could be because I enjoy reading fantasy and adventure books and most of those books are window books to me. I am on track to finish this book soon. 

 

EAT MORE CHICKEN,

David

My Wisdom Tales Project

In school this week, we did a project called Wisdom Tales. We would take a fable or short story that had a moral and make a project with it. I chose to make a comic that showed my Wisdom Tale. I used an app called Comic Life 3. It made it really easy to import images that I drew in an app called Sketchbook. Once I had imported my images, I could add speech bubbles to help tell the story. You can find my comic above this blog post. I hope you like it!

Programming Languages

Have you ever wondered how your computer does all of the things that it does? How do the games that you play on it work? The answer is programming languages! These are the languages that you use to speak to computers! Like in the real world, computer languages are very diverse! In this post, I’ll be discussing three different programming languages.

BASIC

This was an early programming language developed by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. BASIC stands for Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. As the name implies, BASIC was designed to be a very easy language to learn. At the time, most computer languages were in numbers, meaning that you had to memorize lots of 1’s and 0’s if you wanted to know how to write a computer program. In BASIC, the language was much more like English, which made the commands a lot easier to memorize. BASIC is, overall, an easy and popular language that is still used today!

C++

Made by Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the language C, C++ is generally considered to be the best programming language for creating large scale applications. This means that it is the best option for if you want to create something that can handle high volumes of data without affecting the quality of the application. However, C++ is considered one of the hardest programming languages to learn. This is because of its complicated syntax, or set of rules. Although C++ may be hard to learn, it is a versatile language that is in high demand, which, in my opinion, makes it worth learning. 

Python

As a high level language developed by Guido van Rossum, Python is a simple language to learn. Part of the reason that it’s easy to learn is the fact that its syntax is very similar to English. This makes it very straightforward to read and understand. Despite being undemanding to learn, Python is a very powerful language that can be used to create websites and collect data analysis. Python also has a massive amount of libraries. Importing a library allows you to call functions that other people have already made, so that you don’t have to spend time making them again. Python is a great first language and is also immensely popular.

So there you have it! In this blog post, I talked about three popular programming languages. I hope you enjoyed reading it and that it might have been a bit useful to you! Until next time, EAT MORE CHICKEN!

 

 

My Trip to Camp Hanes

Early Thursday morning, me and my classmates went on our first sleep away field trip since 2019 to Camp Hanes in King, North Carolina! We got to ride on a comfy and large bus with plushy seats. On the bus, I sat down in one of the back seats. The trip to Hanes was quite enjoyable, as we got to watch a movie called Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. 

We were all very excited when we finally got to Camp Hanes. We first played some team-building games with our counselors, such as Four Corners and Combat Master. Then, we were assigned cabins based on our advisory and gender and dropped off our stuff at our cabins and got ready for our activities. 

After that, we did many fun activities, the first of which was canoeing. We had a great time paddling across the water. We even had a canoe war where we bumped into each other! Our next activity was archery. I did not enjoy this very much. First, you had to wait for a long time, then you only had five arrows to shoot, and you only got to go once! I also did not know how to properly use the bow. Rock climbing was much more fun. We got to put on a harness and climb up many different rock walls, each varying in difficulty. Instead of climbing the rock walls, you could alternatively climb up the Pixie Sticks or many different small rock walls to get up to the Sky Hammock! Unfortunately, I had to get a drink of water and didn’t get a chance to go up to the Sky Hammock. After some team building activities, we went back to our cabins to go to bed. 

On the way back, we watched Madagascar. We had some technical difficulties with playing the sound of the movie, but we eventually got it working. I didn’t get to enjoy it very much, though, because I got badly carsick. When we got back to Durham Academy, we left our stuff in the locker rooms and waited to be picked up. 

Overall, Camp Hanes was a very enjoyable experience and helped me build more bonds with my classmates. My favorite activity was definitely canoeing, although rock climbing was also very fun. This was my first sleep away field trip ever and went very well. I was disappointed that our trip to Camp Cheerio was canceled, but this definitely made up for it. 

 

 













































David’s Backpack

This summer, I read Finding Someplace for my school. It was about a girl named Reese who enjoys designing clothes. She’s about to celebrate her thirteenth birthday in New Orleans, her home city, when hurricane Katrina hits! During hurricane Katrina, the floodwaters forced her to evacuate from her house quickly and she could only take a few items with her in a backpack. 

Here’s what I would have brought with me. First and foremost, I would bring canned foods and chips because they last for a long time, and water, because without that, I wouldn’t even last a week! Next, I’d bring an inflatable boat. If the flood waters got too high, I could float above the water and potentially rescue people. Next, I’d bring an air pump to inflate the boat. I’d also pack a flashlight and batteries to see in the dark. Finally, I would bring my mother’s credit card and my phone to contact my relatives and for entertainment. That’s what I would bring if I was in Reese’s situation. What would you bring?  

Eat more chicken!

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