Highlights of My Summer

Over the summer recently, I've been busy. Between studying comets, to watching the tide pools, to going back to our homeschool enrichment program, we haven't had much time for blogging.  So now, I'm going to give you the complete overview of everything that has happened since my last post, er, sort of.

We're going to start by going in chronological order which means first you'll learn about our trip to the beach.  Back in July, I went on a seven-day camping trip with my family, my friend Brenna, and her brother Devin. On the second day, we went to go play at the beach. We had learned  most of what we knew about riptides from our first camp out at the beach last year. Actually, I had been to the beach before, but I only learned about riptides last year. I had learned that riptides are waves that go at an angle to pull you out to sea and the only way to escape it was to swim sideways. We learned on this camp out though that you can tell where riptides will happen by how dark and choppy the water is. On another day we went to go see the tide pools. Devin found a crab and caught it. We also saw a crab eating. It was funny because the crab was shoveling food into it's mouth. We also saw some sea anemone, mussels, and many other creatures. On the last day, one of my mom's old friends came over to our campsite for dinner. She video taped a video of us pretending to be caught in a tsunami. We do a different video every year of one of the dangers of the ocean to scare Devin and Brenna's parents. It's quite enjoyable.

On the 11th of August, I started going back to my homeschool enrichment program, Eagleridge. We have moved the school to a new campus, so it's going to take some getting used to. On the next day, August 12th, was the Perseid meteor shower. At nine pm at night we went into the front yard with our folding chairs to watch the shower. Earlier that day we had played a game of "five questions." "Five questions" is a game my mom came up with to help us learn. To play, she comes up with a subject and writes down five questions about it. Our part is to answer the questions. The subject this time was the Perseid meteor shower and our five questions were:

• When is the Perseid meteor shower?

• Will we be able to see the shower from here in Arizona?

• What causes a meteor shower?

• How often can we see the shower?

• Why is it called Perseid?

We printed off some papers, read, and surfed the web to come up with these answers to the questions:

• The Perseid meteor shower is on the night of August 12th.

• Arizona is the best place to see the shower because we'll be hitting it head on.

• A meteor shower is caused when Earth enters a cloud of debris left behind every time a comet nears the sun. The Perseid Shower is caused by the comet Swift-Tuttle.

• The Perseid Shower occurs every mid-August.

• The shower is called Perseid because the meteors seem to radiate out of the constellation, Perseus.

The few meteors we saw were fascinating. We didn't see many though because we couldn't see the constellation, Perseus. We couldn't see the Perseus constellation because there are too many street lights in our neighborhood. In fact, one time a person crashed into a street light by our house and part of the pole came crashing into our house, but that's a whole different story.