There once was a giant as tall as the biggest skyscraper in the whole world. His name was Thor. Thor had a hammer as tall as a three-story house. The hammerhead was 30 ft long and 20 ft wide. It was a huge hammer. Whenever he wanted to make thunder, Thor would bang his hammer against the ground. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boy, did the people tremble whenever he made that sound! Whenever his hammer was about to hit the ground, it would shoot out lightning and rain.

Q: How do you make a toy parascope?

A: To make a toy parascope you will need a long, skinny, rectangular cardboard box, two small mirrors, tape, and scissors. First, cut a square flap on the long side of the cardboard box, near the end. Make sure the flap is tucked in. Next, take a long piece of tape and crumple it all up, and put it on the flap, then put the mirror on top. Flip the box over, and do the same on the other side, on the opposite end (not on the same end as your first flap). Now you have a toy parascope that you can use when pretending to be a spy!

A thousand years ago, in a castle in England, there lived Prince John. His father was King Fixum. Prince John had wanted to do something, so he left in the morning while the guards and the king weren’t looking. He had to do it when the king and guards weren’t looking because the guards did what the king wanted, and the king didn’t want him to go anywhere without him. He brought a money bag with him because he was going shopping, buying things that he liked like chocolate, scrolls with stories he liked, and candy. He didn’t finish shopping until it was dinner time. That was a long time. He forgot his royal horse and carriage so he had to walk all the way home on the road which was 15 miles long. All day long the king had been looking for him. He checked the castle basement, the castle kitchen, and even the prince’s room. The king was worried that the prince had been killed. He couldn’t even go to sleep. When the prince got home, he checked his watch and knew that king was in his royal bed, and he remembered that the king always locked the castle doors before going to bed. So he climbed the castle wall and snuck back into his room. The next morning King Fixum was surprised to see the prince. He asked, “Where have you been?” The prince said, “I won’t tell you.” The king was very happy to see his son, though he still wondered where his son had been.

“What’s so funny?” asked Madeleine.
“Oh, I’m looking at a picture of a bird stuck in a bottle and the bird is holding a sign that says ‘Can I have some candy, please?'” said Gabe, laughing.
“That’s a funny thing!” said Madeleine.
Then Gabe said, still laughing, “On the back of the page there is a bird walking on his head, eating, um… paper!”
Madeleine sighed, “Oh, why are you making up such funny things?”
“I’m not making them up, I’m just telling you what it is.”
Then Gabe showed Madeleine both sides of the paper, and Madeleine laughed so hard that she fell down. She was alright and kept on laughing.

One of our field trips in our school bus was to a Dino Dig. I had a great time because there were lots of dinosaur bones. I even recognized some them! I recognized a Stegosaurus, a T-Rex, and some of the great Saurapods (those are the long-necked dinosaurs). There were paleontologists that were Christians and they told us how dinosaurs fit into the bible, which is nice because we get to know truth, instead of all those thoughts that dinosaur bones are millions and billions of years old. Our earth is only 5000 years old! The Paleontologists even let us dig. I got to use a tool that’s really good for finding the spot where dinosaur bones are buried – it’s called a bone-detector. We found lots of dinosaur bones. One of the dinosaur bones we didn’t know what it was, but the paleontologist knew – it was a Pachyrhinosaur skeleton. Before we left, the paleontologists let us bring back the skeleton that we uncovered. When we left, we realized that our teacher had been at a different part of the dig site and hadn’t seen all of the work that we’d done so we told her all about it. You should go on a Dino dig. It’s great!

I had a lot of fun at the stampede. There were a lot of pancakes and I ate some of them. I ate a lot of syrup with those pancakes! We also had cotton candy, which was super duper great, I mean, who wouldn’t like colored cotton fluff? We saw Chinese dragons with the acrobats in the theatre. One acrobat even stacked chairs really high and balanced and climbed them, and the bottom of those chairs was balanced on long-necked bottles on a table. Know what I thought about that? Not many people can do that! What if those bottles break? We rode the C-train to the Stampede, which I thought would be fun, but I didn’t know that it would be so squishy in there. We could hardly fit our stroller. But it was fun when we rode back because I got to sit down and look out the window and my brother got a seat, too. I had a pretty fun time at the Stampede. So did Gabe.