2021-22 Homeschooling Projects

The ancient greek epic, The Iliad, is commonly assigned in school, but is very long to read and longer without a translation. In this essay I will go over two sources for a summarized look at the story. The Iliad, written by the poet Homer, takes place during the Trojan Wars™ and begins with the gods forgetting to invite the goddess of chaos to a wedding. Extra Credits is a YouTube channel that makes videos about history, mythology, and game design. SparkNotes is a website that provides simplified study helpers for many books and subjects. There are several similarities between Extra Credits' retelling and SparkNotes' retelling.  Both versions cover events that change the course of the story, but in simplified version. In addition, they both have the omniscient narrator perspective, which is where the narrator does not focus on only one character's perspective yet can still show their thoughts.   Yet they aren't exactly the same, there are many differences too. Extra Cr...

The red panda belongs in the kingdom animalia, the phylum chordata, the class mammalia, the order carnivora, the family ailuridae, and the species A. fulgens. This was not always so conclusive. It was named a panda in 1821 by the western scientific community because it eats bamboo and has a pseudo-thumb just like pandas. But it has a long tail that was banded like a lemur’s, as well as a waddling gait that bears lack. That's why in 1825 the red panda was classified as a part of the racoon family because of their odd traits and medium size. Then with the invention of DNA sequencing they were lumped in with bears again. With more extensive research, red pandas were declared part of the weasel superfamily musteloidea. The red panda was too distinct for any existing family, so the red panda had to go into a new family. They chose to call it ailuridae . Currently there are only two known species of red panda: Ailurus fulgens fulgens and Ailurus fulgens styani (also known as Ailurus ful...

Gimble spent his childhood in a large gnomish cave system which opened up to fields and forests. Weather-smiths harnessed magically resonant crystals to keep the weather always sunny and provide a constant flow of clean, refreshing water to the streams and rivers that flowed through the farms and pastures within a certain radius. The temperature was pleasantly warm during the day and briskly cool at night, with occasional rain showers overnight. The weather-smiths maintained all the major crystals and recast the central crystal’s weather spell every ten years.  The townsfolk lived in carved-out homes, and the main working areas were natural caverns. They were friendly with nearby towns and accepted all religions, recognizing that any god could exist and they had no way to prove that one didn’t, but they were not highly religious themselves. Town merchants imported raw materials, and craftspeople made mechanical and magical products for export. While the town took pride in their c...

When making the survey, I wanted six questions on D&D and a bonus question on predictability. The questions were:  Are you familiar with D&D? What alignment would your favorite character identify as? What major stat(s) would your favorite character have? What is the most useful spell in D&D and why? What is your favorite edition of D&D? Have you been the DM? Bonus! Choose a five digit number you think no-one else has chosen, and say why you chose that number. Some interesting responses were:  hexadecimal FF0000 (six digits) -71657 (negative)  five exact same answers, I think their browser was repeatedly sending the response whenever opened I have made one other survey for some school friends on google forms so that is why this one is on google forms. I chose five questions about D&D with one familiarity question and one bonus predictability question. I was particularly interested in the bonus question because I wanted to see the reasoning b...

I looked at four articles about the the Dakota Access Pipeline. One was from the ACLU, one was from the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and two were from Fox News. The Smithsonian article has the perspective of the protesters and focuses on the fear of an oil spill contaminating the water supply, and the ACLU focuses on the resistance to the protesters by the oil company. Fox News has the perspective of a corporation that doesn't care about people but only cares about money, and focuses on celebrities flying on private jets as a way to call the celebrities hypocrites. In conclusion it is important to pay attention to the perspective of the author when reading articles because that affects how events are described.

I was born in the calm village of Yetriel, the daughter of a carpenter and a seamstress. It was a quiet life, and as a tiefling I was shunned a bit, but there were other races in the town and they stood up for me. My parents, also tieflings, said that we were descended from Asmodeus, Lord of the Nine Hells, and were proud of this heritage, but we kept it to ourselves knowing how people would react. Their fire abilities made them feel powerful, but they were always very careful to only use them in our home. My horn shape and skin color is closer to my mother’s, and I have fire abilities just like they do. I was an only child, my parents having chosen not to have more kids because we weren’t well off. I had no close friends growing up, and was very much a loner. Because both my parents worked all day, I started doing household chores at a very young age and learned to be happy with what we had. Unfortunately, the priest in my village was a “purist” who didn’t like other races, and he ref...

I was tasked with writing a poem that is similar to the styles of Beowulf or Emily Dickinson so I wrote a poem using the style of "Because I could not stop for Death". I had writer's block so I forced the problem into a poem. So I could not write a Poem- Stanzas in a 3- My Brain’s so hekin horrible And all it says is E.-- I try to get it into place- It tries to decline- It doesn’t want to write a poem So all it does is whine.-- It has managed to write a poem- It hated it through and through- And I just kept telling it That’s all it had to do.--

  We had an assignment about making poems in the style of Beowulf or Emily Dickinson, and I wrote a Emily Dickinson poem, using her poem "I Have Never Seen Volcanoes" as a template. I have never seen “Potatoes” But, when Farmers tell-- How that old bland ground becomes much blander-- Usually so tasteful-- Bear within in appealing Ordnance Fried, mashed and stuffed -- Being Eaten for breakfast And appealing men-- If the stillness is Draining In the human face-- When apon a hunger Titanic-- Potatoes carve their place.

  Compare/Contrast The books that I will be comparing and contrasting are ‘Five Smooth Stones’ by Kristiana Gregory and ‘The Sign Of The Beaver’ by Elizabeth George Speare. The first book, ‘Five Smooth Stones’, is about Hope, a girl that is about ten years old and lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She lives with her mother, brother, and later in the book, her little sister Strawberry. The time that the book is set in is 1776-1777 at the revolutionary war. The perspective is a first person view of the events that are happening at the time.  The other book that I read is ‘The Sign Of The Beaver’ whose main character is Matt, a 12-13 year old boy who made his cabin from scratch with his father. The year in which this book is set is approximately the year of 1770. His father went away for 3 months to go fetch the rest of his family. The place in which it is set is the Maine frontier. The perspective is third person. These stories are similar in that they both have characters th...

  WATER POLLUTION Water is vital to our survival. It covers about 70% of the surface of the earth, but only 2.5% of that is fresh and 1% of that is available for use. The truth is, we are hurting our environment by polluting our water sources and as a result, killing fish, turtles, and other marine critters. The EPA states that “46% of US streams, 21% of lakes, 18% of coastal waters, and 32% of the nation’s wetlands are contaminated by pollution.” 1 Causes Things that can cause pollution include sewage, toxic waste, oil spills, heavy metal bioaccumulation, plastic, and even invasive species, algal blooms, and ocean acidification. One of the main pollutants is untreated sewage. Untreated sewage is waste like feces, urine, and pharmaceutical products in water. It is estimated that 80% of the world's sewage is untreated. This kills 2.2 million people annually worldwide from diarrheal diseases. 2 Toxic industrial chemicals hurt the environment as well. These include heavy metals like l...

  How to Mitigate the Impact of Human Population Growth Our increasing population requires more resources to sustain, and our ways of collecting those resources are harmful to the environment. We consume those resources inefficiently and our waste products damage ecosystems. Some people say this catastrophic damage is inevitable, but we can mitigate the impact of human population growth with our activities and technologies.  We can use clean/green energy generation (wind turbines, nuclear fission, hydroelectric dams, solar arrays) to reduce carbon pollution from more harmful energy generation technologies. These would replace the three harmful power generation technologies, oil, coal, and gas power plants, which get their resources through drilling, mining, and fracking respectively. Wind turbines Wind turbines vary in cost because of the many types. The turbines generate power by having the wind spin their blades which spin magnets and generate an electric current. The main o...