6th – Avery's Blog

Hello. I am a chelonioidea. Most of you will know me as the green sea turtle though. I am currently 17 years old, and I can live up to 70 years. My species can be found all over the world, but I like to live in big coral reefs, because they provide good protection against sharks and lots of food to eat. I am active for all of the day, and have a diurnal cycle, and spend a lot of my time finding food and sleeping. Today, I went exploring outside of my reef and spent most of the day eating. Afterwards, I went back home to my cave in the coral. I did run into a shark today though, and I had to thrush my shell into its mouth to stop it from biting my flippers. Luckily, I was able to get away, and get to my home just in time, where the shark cant fit into. Besides that, I also ran into one of my friends, the cleaner fish. Him and I have a symbiotic relationship. He will go along my back and clean of all the gunk and algae that has gotten onto it. That way, I get clean, and the fish gets a free meal! A Lot of the fish in the coral reef think that I have a very important job in the coral reef, which is why I have a lot of symbiotic relationships. My job is to eat the excess algae and seagrass, so the reef doesn’t get sick and die. As I said before, animals like sharks, and killer whales will feed on me if they have the chance, but those are my only two main predators. The coral reef that i live in provides lots of food too, not just protection. I like to spend most of my time in the sea grass beds and I will travel 50 yards or more in a day to feed. I spend a lot of my time traveling far to feed or to nest, but when I am at my home in the coral, I like to swim along the reef looking for food like excess algae or bits of sea grass. This is a problem that I want to discuss, so I’ll just say it. We are endangered. There are over 85 to 90 thousand nesting females alone, which may seem like a lot, but over 37 thousand green sea turtles die a year from  fishing nets, plastic, hunting, and some of our nesting sites are being destroyed roads and factories and things. Even if our eggs are safe from destruction,the

babies that hatch still could get eaten by crabs or seabirds, and once they are in the ocean they are also a good snack for sharks, dolphins, and carnivorous fish. I also worry a lot about pollution in the ocean. The plastic in the ocean that I see is sometimes mistaken for food, and i realize just in time that it is dangerous, but some are not that lucky. This is what my day was like, and I hope you liked reading it. Bye!

In science class today, we were assigned pro. I was paired in a group with Ellie and Britton. We are doing plastic, and how it is affecting the ocean and what we can do to stop it. We are essentially making a video on plastic in the ocean, and about why it’s so bad, the causes, etc. We watched videos and looked on websites about how it moves through the river, and how it breaks down into chunks so it’s hard to clean it up. There are other groups also who are doing things like pollution on the land and air, dams, poor water sanitation, or diseases. In the group, there is one person who makes the video and two people who are actually in the video.

Everyone in our group wanted to make a video on plastic in the ocean, because that’s what we all liked. Before we were put into these groups, we watched a video explaining this, and it said that plastic is not bio degradable. We made a script explaining the harm that plastic does to animals, specifically turtles, whales, sharks, and sea birds. We then shot the video on Ellie’s computer, with all of reading the video in front of a green screen. After we watched the video, we saw that it didn’t turn out as we had hoped. The lighting was bad, all of couldn’t fit inside the green screen, the quality was bad, and we couldn’t do the animation because there as no time. Even though it didn’t turn out as we had hoped, it was still fun making the video, and it was funny for the first time, because we failed so many times and it was hilarious. Even though the video didn’t turn out like we hoped, it was still fun to make.

QUESTIONS

• How much plastic is being dumped into the ocean daily?
• How much does it cost to clean up the plastic in the ocean?
• How long does it take for plastic to end up in the ocean?

In California, a company called TechniSoil is working to repave the roads with plastic. It is an expensive process, since they need special equipment to extract and grind the topmost 3 to 6 inches of asphalt. Repaving a single lane mile would require 42 truckloads of new material hauled out to California. Each lane requires the equivalent of 150,000 water bottles, and that would make a huge difference to the earth’s pollution if California and other states pave most of their roads like this. The article also says that the plastic is more resistant to potholes and cracking, and last 3 times longer than roads with standard asphalt.  Even thought doing this would cost a lot of money, it would also save money with the recycling and the potholes and cracks. The standard process requires heat, but the new process works cold, saving more energy as well. 

One reason why I think that this is a really good idea is that it will reduce significantly the pollution in the ocean and on land, which is really important to me. One of the main reasons that many ocean animals are dying is because they are swallowing PLASTIC, and I think that this will really help with that. Also, like the the article said, plastic can take centuries to compose, so we could reuse it so it wont gunk up the earth for centuries while we wait for it to decompose.  Also, this will be good for our roads. The article said that this will make our roads stronger, and while this process will be expensive to do, it will also save money in the long haul. All in all, I think that this process will really help the earth. It will also help us too.

QUESTIONS

• Is this happening in other countries too?
• How long will this take to do all of the U.S if all the states do it?
• How does this process actually work?

Today, the entire class made homemade ice cream. The ingredients that we used are milk, sugar, snow, and a special type of ice cream salt. We mixed the sugar and milk, then went outside and got some snow and mixed it with the milk – sugar mix. Then we poured it into cups and then we got the ice cream. We also learned about the  endothermic and exothermic processes. An endothermic process is when an energy absorbs into a closed system. An exothermic process is basically the opposite, when a system has a process or reaction that releases energy into it’s surroundings.

I was in a group with Maddy and Analie, we went outside, grabbed the snow, and started to shake the substance around to make ice cream. At first we were having problems with it because it wasn’t freezing, and then we were able to get it colder. What was satisfying for me was the process of making it. It was coo to see how you could make ice cream. And, the result was great. When we were gathering the snow for the ice cream, Shane said that the snow was about 30 degrees, meaning that the snow was warmer than the air.  I think that this was one of my favorite projects so far.

QUESTIONS

• How do people make ice cream in the shops, because I think it’s different from this.
• How did people discover the two processes?
• Who created Ice cream? They are a genius.

 

19 days ago, an article was posted about Hawaii’s Kilauea volcanic eruption created a lava lake.  The volcano had been erupting constantly for almost three decades, from 1983 to 2018. It had stopped producing lava for almost two years now, and many people believed that it was over. Then on December 20th, 2020, the volcano started to produce large amounts of lava for around 11 days.  As of December 31st, 2020, the volcano had ejected over 27 million cubic meters. That is enough to fill over 800 Olympic sized swimming pools! The lava replaced an existing lake with lava lake that is almost 600 feet deep. In 2018, the molten lave flowed through the town, destroying almost 700 homes.

I chose this article because biology really interest me. I like learning about pollution and habitats mostly, but I like volcanoes as well. I think this particular article is also important so we can understand volcanoes better in the future. For example, I didn’t know that a volcano could continue erupting for almost three decades. I also didn’t know that a volcano could spurt out that much lava. That’s what I like about biology. We can use things like these to prevent as much damage from volcanoes in the future, so we will be safer.

QUESTIONS:

• does any animal live on volcanoes, or very close to them?
• what is the biggest lava lake in the world?
• do you think that in the future people will be able to go to the center of the earth?

Before we went on that short virtual school time, we were learning about mass, volume, and density. One

of the activities that we did was we had three different items that we would drop in water, and then see what the water level was after the object was in the water. Before that we would record what level the water was at before we dropped the object in the water. We had partners for this, and mine was Morley, and she did one side of the paper, and I did the other side. The day after that, we had a review to see what we know about mass, volume, and density. I think that I did pretty well on the review, most of it made sense to me. We also watched a short LEGO animation video about Archimedes and the “solid” gold crown. The king was gifted a “solid” gold crown, but Archimedes didn’t believe that it was solid gold, and that the king had been duped. 

After that, crystal and Elizabeth said that a person in our class was getting tested for Corona, so we had to do virtual for a few days, which was worse that I thought, because I was so used to regular school. For this activity, I think that I participated fairly well in this assignment. I think that I could’ve paid attention more, but I think I did fairly well. In the partner project, I would have done each side of the paper together, so that I knew everything instead of one part for the review.  I really liked the partner project and the video, it was really cool to learn about mass, volume, and density.

QUESTIONS

• Who created mass, volume, and density?
• What other kind of experiments could we do with them?
• Have any other stories like the tale of Archimedes ever happened?

Today we played this really fun game called Owls vs. Crows. We were separated into two groups, one owls, and one crows. We were asked a bunch of science based questions like ” abiotic is living organisms”, and if the answer was false, the crows would chase the owls, and if the answer was true, then it was vise versa. We played this at the very end of science, like the last ten minutes. The time before that we were working on our biomes ( last blog ), and then took a walk and played the game. There were safe zones where the other team couldn’t go, and anyone who was tagged outside of the safe zones became part of the other team. The team with the most would win. It was kind of like a tag sort of thing.

Like I said before, we had worked on our projects just before we had come down there, and I talked about that in the last blog. I am a little worried that we aren’t able to finish the website in time, but as long as Emma or me doesn’t get distracted, then I think it will be fine.

QUESTIONS

• Is Owls vs. Crows a real game?
• Will we do another project like this biome one?
• Will we do another game like this?

Today is December 9th, and we are getting pretty far on the project. The box is almost done, but we really need to focus on the website. Emma made a mushroom tree for it and we all thought it was funny. Anyway, I like creating my own website a lot because I’ve never done that before and it’s really cool how you can see how some other people do it. Many other people are getting far on the project, mostly with the box I’ve noticed. Today we switched who worked on what and I think that helped a lot because I wasn’t AS distracted. I did work with a bunch of other people so I did get distracted a lot. Shane says that we are gonna move on soon, so me and Emma can’t get distracted any more if we wanna finish this thing. But overall, I love working on this, though sometimes the website can get boring.

like I said before, I did get distracted a lot, and that thing was annoying, because I didn’t get as much done as I should have. Emma did a good job on the project and the website, and I think with one more day we can finish the model.

QUESTIONS

• Who founded wix?
• What is the next thing we will work on?
• What kinds of websites are on wix?

We just started on a biome project with a partner. My partner was Emma.  We picked a biome out of a bowl and me and her got rainforest. We each had to pick one animal and one plant in the rainforest, and I picked the giant water lily for my plant and an ocelot for my animal. Emma picked monkey brush for her plant and a boa constrictor for her animal. We will have to create a diorama of the biome with the animals and plants included. We also will create a website on this site called wix about our biome, plants, and animals. WE have planed out what the diorama will look like, and have started to divide up what parts of the website each of us will be doing. 

Shane gave us a google doc for our website, and it has questions for our website. On our website, we will answer things like, “how much rain does your biome get, or what are some ways that humans depend on it.” We have to answer the same types of questions for our animals and plants as well. I really think that I’m going to like this project, because we are learning about the amazon rainforest while also doing a model, which I love. Since we just started, we haven’t really started on much yet, but we are doing the website if we don’t have enough supplies to do the diorama. 

QUESTIONS

• What will happen if humans cut down the entire amazon rainforest?
• How many species of animals live in the amazon?
• Why does the amazon get so much rain every year?

Yesterday, we all learned about the Carbon Cycle and the Nitrogen Cycle. We were separated into groups and my group played a game based on the Carbon cycle. You would roll a dice, and you would move to a different spot on the Carbon Cycle  depending on what you rolled. I started at the ocean surface, went to atmosphere, went to plants, then, soil, then fossil fuels, etc. It was really fun for me because we got to kinda experience what the carbon molecules go through in the Carbon Cycle. We also wrote down where we went in the cycle, and after made a little story out of it. It was super fun to play and experience.

 Besides the game, I did learn some things about the Carbon Cycle. For example, I learned that 8