Julius Caesar, Loch Ness Monsters, Olympics, and Komodo Dragons

Wow, it's been almost a month since I've blogged! In January, we began reading Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. We are using the "No Fear" version by Sparknotes. On one side of the page is Shakespeare's version in iambic pentameter which gives it a sing-song quality. On the other side is a more modern translation that is easier to understand. We were laughing at Act One, Scene One where they translated Flavius's words to, "Get out of here! Go home you lazy men!" I wouldn't have guessed that Shakespeare would write something like that. We also saw the play, and we're going to see the movie, or at least everyone else is. I have no intentions on seeing the bloody, tragic Julius Caesar again, not that I didn't like it. I also wrote a paper on Mark Antony's speech. I will share it with you as soon as possible.



I have been doing a lot of writing recently even though I haven't let you see it yet. I wrote a story called "My Night with the Loch Ness Monster" for my "Fantasy Fiction" class at Eagleridge. It's about a girl who finds a Loch Ness Monster egg and helps get the baby monster back into the loch it came from. I also wrote an article on Dian Fossey in my Composition class, also at Eagleridge. The next article we'll be doing in my Composition class is one on "The White House Gang," Teddy Roosevelt's children. The latest thing I did in my "Fantasy Fiction" class was write a summary on the book The Water Horse by Dick King-Smith. I'm also writing two stories right now. One is unnamed, but the other one is so far called "Terri Cooper." This blog is also one of my at-home writing projects. I want to share all of them with you. I will let you see them..... once I'm done with them.


While we have been doing all this writing, we have also been learning about the world around us. Since the earthquake in Haiti to the Vancouver Winter Olympics, our month has been filled with world geography. We even have our world thinking day celebration in Girl Scouts coming up! How do we get our answers to our questions? Well, one of the books we have been using is The Handy Geography Answer Book. It gave us answers to questions like: what is the fertility rate (average children per women) in Haiti? 4.7. What is the fertility rate in the U.S.? 2.1. What languages do they speak in Haiti? French and Creole. What about in the U.S.? English and Spanish. We can even look up populations and laugh at 4.7 of a person being born. Because of the Olympics, we looked up a lot more places than just Haiti and the U.S. We looked up just about every country that participated in the Olympics. We also decided, because we're learning about the world, to start learning German. I love it. I've been teaching it to my best friend and now we speak German(or Deutsch, pronounced doy-tch) very loudly in the car. My mom has lots of German books and just got a clearance ($2) German phrases and expressions calendar with a phrase for every day. I don't know what's more fun: teaching the phrases to my best friend Brenna, learning the phrases myself, or saying them with Brenna.

On Friday, February 19th, we went to the Phoenix Zoo to draw animals with a homeschooling art class. Even though we used only one type of pencil, we bought three different types: B, 2B, and 4B. Our teacher, Ms. Brown, sold us our special sketchbooks and gum erasers last year when we took a class with her. Some of the tips she gave us were to: look for basic shapes in the animals body, squint your eyes to see details better, look for the outline of the animal, and instead of looking at your paper, look at the animal and let your brain take control and focus on what the animal really looks like instead of what it's supposed to look like. We drew giraffes, zebras, ducks, komodo dragons, and elephants. Brenna went too. It was so much fun drawing pictures and laughing at our horrible imitations of these more realistic looking animals. It was truly a unique experience.

The Case of Our Flawed Super Market

Earlier this week, we watched a movie called Food, Inc. This movie is a documentary about where your food really comes from. One of the problems it addresses is animal abuse. Before I saw this movie I had no idea that people are feeding cows corn instead of grass. Nor did I know that it was bad for them, but it turns out incorrect feeding is one of the causes of more than 73,000 cases of e. coli deaths per year. These mass farming facilities changed the way cows are fed just so that the cow gets fatter quicker and the company saves a few bucks. Another problem involving animal abuse is what the companies are doing to the chickens. Because companies like Tyson want their chickens to grow faster, they genetically modify the chickens. This action causes many of the chickens to grow so fast that their bones cannot keep up and many of them can't even walk. The chickens also suffer organ failure from this rapid growth. To add on to their sad life, the chickens are being grown in chicken houses so crammed with chickens there has to be an elevated board in the middle to get around.

However, you may be thinking why are the farmers treating them this way. When a chicken farmer is employed, they raise the chickens the way the company wants them to and they have to submit to their demands or have their contract terminated. This means that this company can say that in order to work for me, you have to have this certain piece of equipment. This might not seem like a problem, but the company does not pay for the special equipment forcing the farmer to go to the bank, get a loan, and then buy the equipment out of the farmer's own account. So chicken farmers are just modified versions of slaves. Another problem with our food system is crop farmers being sued for reusing seeds which have a patent on them, such as Monsanto's genetically modified, pesticide-resistant seeds. Sometimes these seeds spread unknowingly, but Monsanto has seed police looking for them.

Some things I learned from the website www.foodincmovie.com to help change these problems include: buying organic or sustainable foods with little or no pesticides, buying from your local farmers market, reading labels to find out where your food comes from, supporting the passage of laws requiring chain restaurants to post calorie information on menus and menu boards, and demanding job protections for farm workers and food processors ensuring fair wages and other protections.

Creepy Coincidence

Earlier this month, we saw the play Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. The play was exactly the same as the original version except this version takes place in America after the Civil War. The costumes and set design were made to look like America during the Civil War of 1861-1865. The director of the play made these changes to help better understand how these wars do more damage than good. Before we saw the play, my mom printed off a study packet from Southwest Shakespeare Co.. The study packet contained a lot of interesting information about the play, including a section about the similarities between Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln. It turns out that both of them were assassinated by men whose first names started with J and last names started with B: Junius Brutus and John Wilkes Booth. Both of these assassins had a conspiracy of 8 men helping them. Also, both Caesar and Lincoln were assassinated when they were 56 years old, both men were Republicans in a country that did not like the thought of being ruled by a king, both were killed in theaters (Lincoln in Ford's theater and Caesar in Pompey's theater), both were assassinated after a civil war, and both had premonitions of their deaths. I think it was a good play, although I don't think the guy who played Cassius was ever told to say it not spray it.;)