SJBE -- Blogmeister

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Road kill Analysis

Our class recorded road kill for the past two months and now every student is creating a project based on a variable we choose to follow. I’m a loser. I decided to see if the day of the week made a difference in the amount of road kill. My hypothesis was the there would be the most amount of road kill on Saturday. I chose this day because I figured that people are off work and have free time to drive around.

After doing research on the variable for three different years I made some conclusions. I realized that on average for the three years the day with the largest amount of road kill was on the weekend but on Sunday not Saturday. I think this happened because there is more tourism on Sunday and even more people are off from work than on Saturday, also the people who record road kill are more likely to remember the road kill they see on Sunday the next day they’re at school then on Sunday.

Even though my hypotheses about a certain day of the week was wrong my general idea of the weekend having an effect did seem true. Other variables that could effected my hypotheses could be different events happening in rye to bring more tourism, the time of the year because people come to the beach when its warm. I think my conclusions and hypotheses could be more accurate if I had more data from more years so I could look for patterns. If I had to do this project again I would predict the data to turn out similar with Sunday.

Seedfolks

This book is about a community of many different people of different nationalities. This city in Cleveland, Ohio is brought together by a little garden started in a dirty vacant lot. The garden was started by a nine year old Vietnamese girl. The lima beans she plants quickly becomes the beginning of a full-scale community garden with a variety of plants and gardeners.

Our whole school read Seedfolks by Paul Flieschman because we are planting a community garden at our school. In the 7^th grade we even made projects to go along with the book. We designed our own seed packets one was based on a character in our book and the other was based on something special in our own lives. I chose a man named Tio Jaun from my book and I chose my dog for my other.

Our grade recorded roadkill in our community for 8 weeks. This graph represents the total recorded deaths for each animal over the 8 week period.I was surprised with the amount of gray squirrel deaths.

I designed my Antarctica flag with many things that represent the continent on it. For example I drew the map outline on Antarctica with a globe and a peace sign on it to show that all the countries are united on it and work in peace. This map sits on top of a half black and half white background because half of the year on Antarctica has daylight and the other half has darkness. On the other half of the flag there is a scene that shows some creatures and what it could look like in the ocean around Antarctica. There are some animals such as penguins and a whale and you can see ice and the large mountains on The continent in the back ground of the scene.

In math class we invested $10,000 (in fake money) in the stock market. The first company I bought stock for was Verizon communications. I invested in Verizon because I knew about the company and it was at a low price at the time and it was beginning to rise in value. The second company I invested in was Progressive. I invested in progressive because I had heard of it before and it seemed like a good functioning company. My final investment was in Agilent Technologies. I didn’t really know much about this company so I just took a chance. After researching my stocks and watching the stock market there are a few changes I would make. The company I wouldn’t invest in after this experience is Agilent Technologies. Agilent Technologies’ stock did not perform well and I lost money at the end of the 14 week period. The value of the stock also dropped for the majority of the time. If I could choose something else to invest in I would invest in a well known company with a good history. The final thing I would do differently would be to buy more Verizon stock because it held its value the best out of all my stock and it even made money. If someone else was going to invest in the stock market I have some advice to give them. They should purchase stock when the think it’s at its low point, the advantage of this it that you can buy more of stock for less and the price will usually rise in value. Another tip is to research the companies you’re thinking about investing in before purchasing. My final advice is to look at the historical prices for the stocks, that way you can see if there were or are any trends in its value. This whole experience has taught me a lot about the stock market and it will help me if I ever want to invest later in life.