Cora's Aerial Fun

 I had a great time at Miss Cheryl's house doing my aerial acrobatics. It was so fun to get back into it after a long time of not participating. I had to remember everything that I had been taught before, which was kind of difficult, but all in all I had a great time.

In this picture, I'm doing a move called Arrow Good Times. There are lots of different steps to this move, and many of them are difficult, but I've aced it so far.

 This move I'm doing is a bird, which is a double wrap flip-over, where you have to go upside down to get into the move. You have to have a lot of core strength, so Miss Cheryl sometimes has to boost me up.

 This is one of my favorite moves, because when you go upside down, you get to see the world from an entirely different perspective. This one is called "Peter Pan." Before positioning myself into the move, I have to tie a knot into the silk (behind my knees in the photo) and hoist myself up.

This is me and my wonderful teacher Miss Cheryl. I loved meeting up with her after a long break - thank you, Grandma and Grandpa, for paying for me to have a lesson!

A New Class for Cora

 Hello! It's Cora! I have been getting into silks. It's really fun! Grandma and Grandpa paid for two classes for me to learn how to do silks, or aerial acrobatics.

My teacher, Cheryl, is an old friend of Grandma's and went to my parents' wedding. She's really nice and patient, and she's very good at silks.

The hoop was a little harder than I expected, because I had to twist my body and hang off the thin edge without crashing into the floor.

I can't wait to be able to do it again, because I thought it was a really good workout for me and it was really enjoyable.

Return to Vasquez Rocks

      After we had Cooper over to play, I wanted to have him over again so we could go to Vasquez Rocks, an amazing place for outdoor rock climbing.  Cooper and I climbed every rock we could see (which was a lot of rocks!).

Dad tried to play it cool with his flat cap and hot shades. But Violet here, was having none of it. LOL!

Cooper and I climbed up a big, unusually shaped boulder and rested a little.

As you can see, we went up pretty high, as my mom was on the ground taking this photo. It was no easy rock climb though, we had to dig our shoes into the hollow rock to cling to the face of the stone to avoid being blown off the rock.

Mom, Dad, and Violet went  the easy way after we agreed to meet in a valley close-ish. Cooper and I scaled boulders while Mom, Violet, and Dad walked on the plain old boring ground!

But, while we went out adventuring, Violet and Mom discovered a shallow cave that was the biggest that we had seen all day, as there were a few small ones along the way, which we had explored to see if they went any deeper.

When Cooper and I met up with my parents and Violet, I went to go see the cave, and I reckoned that Native Americans could have lived in it.We went pretty darn high up too!

After we finished Vasquez Rocks we went to Dunkin Donuts and enjoyed a donut ( and in Mom's case, gross coffee.) Then, we quickly stopped at In and Out to get burgers. We then headed home to watch a movie and play outside. I sure had a great day!

Time Travelers

My class has to do a report on the Gold Rush and either do a drawing or take a picture of what our character that we made up would have looked like.
     Cooper, Wylie, and I decided to head down to Placerita Canyon to take our Gold Rush pictures.

In this photo here, Dad made me bring my violin so it would look like I was playing a fiddle. Cooper snapped along. But, Wylie wasn't exactly enjoying it.

I created a person for my auto-biography called Lee Holsted. He comes from Cornwall in England and comes to California so he can get some money so his  parents are able to keep the house from being lost in the debt they were in.
        After many attempts to pull my hair back, I still look like a girl dressing up to look like a boy!
       Dad, Cooper, Wylie, Violet, and I all helped set up a camp ground. Maybe we went a little over the top, but hey! At least it was really fun!

  

Lee Holsted pans for gold instead of mining for it. Here, I was panning for gold in the tiny stream that flowed through Placerita Canyon. Unfortunately, my luck must have been low because I didn't find anything.

Here are my pals, Nic Froter and Carter Holly, aka, Cooper and Wylie. At one point, Cooper was on my claim so I hit him in the head with my shovel.( I was just pretending!)

Here is my finished project!

Rancho Camulos

At my school, we always go to Rancho Camulos in fourth grade instead of doing the mission project. Cooper, Jason, and I were bus buddies for the 20 minute drive to and fro.

Our first stop was the old chapel, where a lady told us about the Del Valle's small church that Mrs. Del Valle wanted so badly.











This is the cork tree that the Del Valle's needed for their tiny winery.
It was pretty cool to be able to sink our nails into the spongy bark of the tree.

 After the cork tree examination, it was time to make some corn tortillas to munch on... or not.

Although we made the lovely smelling tortillas, we were not allowed to eat them or cook them. The small balls of dough we flattened had to be rolled right backup and put back in the basket for the next group of kids to use. Such a great disappointment.

After rolling up the raw balls of tortilla dough, we headed over to the laundromat. I think our tour guides needed a lot of their rags - "dirty clothes" - washed up.

The adobe bricks that made up the entire building in 1840 is what we made next. All we had to do was add dirt, dried grass, and water. Now, my adobe brick is dry and fully formed.

Mom was the parent helper along with Nicolas and Sebastian's mom.

That field trip was epic, I definitely am going back there again!!!

Science and School Council

For the last couple of weeks, I have been working on my science fair projected. My topic is "Which Materials Conduct Electricity?".

In the picture to the left, there are all of the materials that I needed to build my open circuit. Dad let me do all of the soldering and connecting.  

 Doing all of that soldering made my hands ache and it was very hot! I had to be careful not to touch the hot bit of the metal or it would dry all over my hands.

Dad really helped me a lot by asking me a ton of question that I could answer for my poster. We came up with four or five of them.

 

 This is me testing my circuit to make sure the light bulb worked. I had to test 16 materials to do my test experiments I think it was very interesting to find out which materials are conductors and which ones were insulators.

 This is me with my newly finished poster board.

You can see in the bottom left hand corner how many questions Dad and I came up with!

I was announced Student Council Member on Tuesday afternoon by Mrs. Shafarman. I have many awesome ideas that will make Meadows Elementary School the best school in the world.

Our Ventura Trip - by Cora, with Mommy typing

We went to Ventura to visit Uncle Bill and Aunt Patty and went to the beach for a day.

After Grandma and Grandpa's house for Easter, we came over to their house to sleep for the night.

In the morning, after we watched five episodes of Wild Kratts, we had a great breakfast of homemade pancakes with sunflower seeds mixed into the batter, with whipped cream and blueberries.

(Note from Lisa - Thanks, Uncle Bill, for making breakfast and babysitting so Stace and I could take a morning beach walk!)

We went on a very long bike ride, from their house to the pier, along the beach coast.

This is a picture of me and Violet and the pretty beach scene behind us.

(Note from Lisa - Please see the Beanie Boo clips that came along for the ride - Vi has two owls clipped to her bike, while Cora's fox is attached to her shirt. These girls are never far from their animal friends.)

We had a bike break at the pier playground. We had a lot of fun making pretty little statues with rocks, and playing at the playground.

The bike ride was about five miles there and back. Violet was outstanding. She only stopped twice - to get our lunch, and play.

We had lunch at In-N-Out. Violet got a milkshake, and at 7-11, I got an slurpee, for a treat.

Then, we went back to the house, and I went to a door place with Uncle Bill and Dad. I got lots of candy there. We went to the door store because Uncle Bill needed to trade in a door for their bathroom project.

Then we got ready to go to the beach. It was evening, so it was not very warm. The waves were tiny and not very fun. There was a very bad current so we could not go out far enough to get the good waves.

We went boogie boarding anyway. I was looking forward to it, and wasn't very happy when the water was cold and the waves were so small.

I had a little bit of fun. I am in my new wetsuit I got from England.



















The walk home was freezing and Violet had to be wrapped up in a sweatshirt.

After I was showered and all cleaned up, me, Mom and Dad went on a walk to get some supplies - marshmallows and supplies for nachos.
While we went, I had my bag to collect palm branches and twigs for the firepit, because we were going to have a fire.















We roasted marshmallows, and had a great time. When it was time to leave, we all gathered our stuff and waved and yelled goodbye from the car.

We had a great time at our uncle and auntie's house. We hope we can have big warm waves for boogie boarding in the summer.

Cora's Whale Watch

 I went on a whale watch with my Grandpa and Grandma last Saturday.

We saw so many animals. 9 animals!
Last time I only saw dolphins and seals. Well I will tell you what I saw on the whale watch.

We saw 2 baby great white sharks. One we only saw it's shadow but the next we saw the whole body. It was very big!!!
I was not scared but glad to be in a boat! 

I also saw a oil tanker out to sea I even took a picture of it.

Look how small the boat is next to the oil tanker!

Oil tankers get oil from the bottom of the sea.

 Next we saw dolphins leaping up and out of the water. One even swam under the boat!

The water was so clear so I got to see the dolphins swimming under the water!
It was so cool.




  

 This is me standing on the deck with my Grandma.

This is were we saw all of the animals, sharks and all. we also saw sea lions,seals,and some different kinds of sea birds
pelicans,seagulls,even baby ducks!

I also put my hand out to catch the water that was at the side of the boat spraying up out of the water.










We saw 9  whales! We saw their fins and we also saw their spouts. One was so close to our boat that we saw the body!  The waves were so clear, and one swam under water and then jumped back up! One was really, really close to a little boat that was next to us, but we had to stay 10 yards away. I wanted to be a little bit closer.

There were lots of mountains behind, so it made a pretty scene with the whales jumping up. We saw the barnacles sticking to the whales when they were close to the boat. We also got to the islands out to sea. Last time, we got to go all the way around them, but this time we went halfway. We also saw caves in the rocks at the islands. The way the water sprayed out of the rocks was so cool.
The whale watch took three hours - two hours to go, one hour to get back.