lifeinflux

Today, in Nature Studies, we continued talking about rain forests and ecotourism. My assigned question to answer was, “Where in Central America has the highest ecotourism rate?” and the answer is Costa Rica.  I had to Google my question and read a few websites and compare data to make sure my answer was correct.  We then played a game. Each person pulled a piece of paper from a bucket, and it had one of two things written on it. If the piece of paper has an “O” on it, you are a good guy. If the piece of paper had a “K” on it, you are the killer. You walk around and shake everyone’s hands, not knowing who the killer is.  The killer has a special handshake where they slide their thumb down your palm. You’d keep shaking other people’s hands, but after five seconds you’d drop dead. The point of the game is to try to guess who the killer is. We played this game a couple times to warm up and then started working on our projects. Each group of two received a precipitation map, a soil type map, a temperature map and a plant diversity map to figure out where the rain forests were located in the world. When we located the rain forests, we received a blank map of the world and shaded where the rain forests were.  By the time I finished my map, class was over and it was time to go to online publishing.

Online Publishing was fun. Today we started working with HTML. We looked over what the previous classes had done on an HTML website and we altered the code a little to make it our own. The HTML page is called “Academic Pirates”, we added a little bit of text, added a picture and then Dave told us to alter it further for homework. The time flew by and I started thinking of ways to make the HTML page better by changing the text and by adding more to the background.    

History of Rock was really cool! We are now listening to music from the late 50s and 60s and our entire class focus was  Elvis Presley, so we spent the entire class period listening to his music. A couple of the songs we listened to were “Blue Suede Shoes”, “Hey, Jude”, “Hound Dog” and “Jailhouse Rock”. The songs we listened to were really fun and, if people knew the lyrics to the songs, they would sing along to them. At the end of class, we talked about the two major rock artists that died yesterday, Johnny Otis and Etta James.  I found out Johnny Otis played drums on Hound Dog, but not Elvis’ Hound Dog!  He played for a lady named Big Mama Thornton who released her version of Hound Dog four years before Elvis recorded his version!   Etta James sang jazz and while I am not a jazz fan enjoyed listening to a couple of her songs.

Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock”:

Elvis Presley’s “Blue Suede Shoes”:

Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog”:

Johnny Otis’s “Willie and the Hand Jive”:

Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog”:

Etta James’ “At Last”: