A Dwarf Planet and Diminishing Footprints

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In between swimming, pitch and putt, fireworks, parades, and aimless summer wandering through the city, we have been finishing up our Canadian Curriculum grade seven review of Language Arts.

Reading comprehensions and grammar have been the focus of most of the workbook, but we are now moving into the last few lessons and a chance to work on more extended (non-fiction) compositions.

Before you move into essays, knowing how to write a paragraph is essential. A good paragraph has a structure: a topic sentence that states the main idea, supporting points (at least three), and a concluding sentence that summarizes the topic sentence and points made in the body.

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I have to give the Canadian Curriculum editors credit. They do an excellent job of incorporating a multiple of subjects and topics into the Language Arts unit. This lesson had an environmental theme and gave us a great opportunity to revisit a past Geology unit.

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They offered two writing prompts beginning with Plant a Tree Day. From our studies ...

Yesterday was Plant a Tree Day at my school. If you plant trees, you offset your carbon footprint and help the environment. Trees take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen when they respire. Their roots break up bedrock, and along with their dead leaves, create new soil. When a tree falls down, it becomes a nurse log for a whole diverse mini-ecosystem. Trees give shade and decrease the surrounding temperature on hot days. Planting trees is good for local ecosystems, our carbon footprint, temperature regulation, and soil production.

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The second prompt was a little more fanciful and involved a Deux Ex Machina in the form of a well-meaning alien. From our studies ...

I read an interesting story about how an alien helped a little girl save some endangered animal species on Earth. The little girl wrote a list of all the animals endangered. Like Noah with his ark, Seven, the Erisian, brought two, a male and a female, of every animal on the list onto his space ship. Seven then took the animals to Eris for safe keeping and to breed. It was an imaginative, sci fi story about helping endangered animals.

Eris, for those of you not in the know, is a dwarf planet out in the Kuiper Belt. We do love our space and love to incorporate it into our studies whenever possible. Eris is Minime's favorite planet that isn't.