The thing that I will do to better live in harmony with nature came to me at the last moment. Lots of parents, while waiting for their kids in the Orange Grove Middle School parking lot, let their cars run. While you are idling, you are getting 0 mpg. This wastes an enormous amount of fuel. Amy wanted to start a group that would try to prevent this. She said that they would do many things, including going to the principle and putting up posters. In addition to Amy mentioning the group, now called “Team Green”, when we took a trip to the mission control center of the Phoenix, we learned how bad Mars’ atmosphere is. That got me thinking, if we kept releasing Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere, we might end up like Mars. If our atmosphere ended up like Mars’, our atmosphere would be thin and full of carbon dioxide. If Team Green could stop parents from idling, we could help prevent that from happening. My plan is to first get my principal’s permission. After that, we could put up signs in the parking lot telling parents to turn off their cars.

Sometime in the first week, we got a live animal presentation. We got to see a lot of animals, including a scorpion, a millipede, a quail, and ringtail. But my favorite animal was a military macaw. He could do many tricks, like lifting his wing up, lifting his foot up, and sometimes talking. There is one thing that you should know about this Military Macaw, he will do anything for a nut. When Amy took out a big round walnut, he turned upsidown on the perch without being asked.

In addition to the animal presentation, we also got a drawing lesson in oil pastels from Jes?s. Like Amy, Jes?s is an Education Specialist at the Desert Museum. The focus of the lesson was drawing in 3D. We learned how to draw a cactus, a barn owl, a tarantula, a cat, and a scorpion. We learned how to smear the oil inward and good 3D drawing angles.

When we went to Mt. Lemmon, we met up Rex Adams, a dendrochronologist, or a person who studies the ages of trees. Rex let us use an increment borer, a tool that drilled a small hole in a tree and took out a small section that you could count the rings on. This allowed us to determine the age of the tree without cutting it down. The farther apart the rings are, the more water the tree got that year.

On Monday of the first week, we went up to Mt. Lemmon. The first thing that we did when we got up to the summit was ride the ski-lift. My mom came, but she couldn’t ride with me because she had to go with my little brother who came along. Instead, I rode with my friend Kevin. When we got to the top we looked at the other side of the mountain, it was all burned due to a forest fire. This is a picture of me (left) and Kevin (right).