Author: Reed Karman

In Cool Stuff 2.0 we learned about artificial retina’s for blind people. But it does blurry crude pictures and the brain has to learn to fill in the rest of the pictures. We also learned about different types of watches. One of them uses binary code, another uses internet time. A worldwide time that has 1,000 bits per day and it has no time zones so there is no confusion over that. Another receives constant radio updates from an atomic clock. We only had two books to read together because Mom accidentally read ahead yesterday. We had Science and a weird read-aloud about the Trojan War.

In History we learned about the Middle Kingdom of Egypt how the Hykos took over it and how the Egyptians adopted their weapons and drove them out. In the Middle Kingdom Egypt took over Nubia but hundreds of years later they made their own dynasty and took over Egypt. We also reviewed the Chinese and learned about Southern Africa. The book said Egypt and Southern Africa developed very differently but other than the religion they seemed the same basically. We read seven poems mostly about birthdays. Two of them were named “The Fairies”. The first was about little men in green clothes who scare people away from the forest because they can magically place thorns in people’s beds and stuff. The next was about a little girl became queen of the fairies at night and they sat on moonbeams and took the stars out of skies. They were both very weird but I liked the first one better. Our experiment for Science was dropping our different liquids except canola oil into canola oil and observing how they mixed. We were going to go look down from a five-story building and run a football field to get a feel for how tall and long Noah’s Ark was but Mom did not know where to go.

In History we learned about the tribes that lived in the Sahara before it became a desert and how they moved south when it started becoming one. We read four poems about housekeeping and sickness. In Science we looked at the fossil record more. During Vocabulary Vine I was learning about the root word bio and made a new word for alien: biotel.

Scientist found millions fossils of soft-bodied invertebrate and of embryo and that proves that small and soft-tissued can be fossilized. In one spot in Wyoming there was man who built his house of dinosaur bones because that was the plentiful building materials in the area.

“A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the fact and arguments of both sides of each question.”

–Charles Darwin

In History we learned about India. No one knows how the Indus Valley civilization ended. The Indus River flooded every year. The Amorites were able to take over Sumer. We read eight poems about random things. In Science we learned about bioplastic, hydroponics, supermarket technology and dry shampoo. Bioplastic is biodegradable.hydroponics is growing plants in nutrient rich water so you don’t need soil. Dry shampoo sticks to dirt so you can comb it off because it is big enough with the shampoo stuck too it. In our experiment we timed how long it took our four liquids to slide down some wax paper taped to a jar at an angle. I had to write a peace treaty with at least five articles but I could not think of one so Mom let me write a constitution instead. I also had to write a poem, I tested out my theory that if yo close your eyes, open a dictionary and point to a random word it will make just as much sense as a regular poem. It worked!

All I did yesterday was Math and Spelling because we were packing for a trip to New York. In Math I did more on negatives.