My Birthday and Dance Camp

Sort of recently(as in in this month)it was my birthday! I had a dinner party. To start we painted picture frames. Mine was a bunch of colors making stripes with blue polka dots on top of them. After we all finished our paintings we had dinner, which was lasagna, salad and homemade pickles. Then I got to open my presents! They were all really cool! I got stuff like a rock candy growing kit, earrings, and a lot more awesome presents. Next, we made a fire. We had s'mores and played games. After that everyone left.


A week after that my mom and I left to go to Dance Camp. It was really fun! I met a new friend and did stuff with old friends. I was also in the 9-12's for the first time, even though I was 10(I wasn't at camp last year). The 9-12's is a childcare thingy that people who are nine to twelve years old go to. I had good counselors and did fun activities. My favorite activities were LARP(Live Action Role Playing), and foosball. LARP...is kind of hard to explain. It's like a fantasy world where you are on a quest and you fight monsters with foam swords and spells, but better than it sounds. In the end of LARP for the year we all got a necklace with a shell pendant on it. Dance Camp was really fun!

North Carolina

I told you I went to North Carolina, right? Well, now I will tell you what we did. First of all, we drove there, which was pretty annoying and long. It was over one hundred and ten degrees in Richmond when we were passing through Virginia! We survived the drive, though, and stayed where my grandma lives, which is kind of like a community where seniors live in little apartments. They had an indoor pool and a indoor hot tub. We didn't only see my grandma. One night we had dinner with my aunt and great aunt, too. Then we left for the beach. The ride was much shorter. At the hotel that we were staying at, there was a beach(of course), an outdoor pool, and a lounge where you could play pool and ping-pong. There we met with my grandma, grandpa and my uncle. While we were there we swam a lot, played lots of ping-pong and pool, and just did stuff in our room. It was really fun! But we weren't staying there for the rest of the summer, so we had to go home. It was a long trip back. We didn't stop, even to sleep(we started going back home at nine am)! Finally we got back and went straight to bed. Going to North Carolina is always really fun!

Art Camp Day #5

The fifth day of Art Camp was great! I'm sorry I couldn't post this sooner, But my family and I were in North Carolina, and they didn't have a computer where we were staying. I'll tell you about our trip later. Anyway, on the fifth day we studied Vincent van Gogh(pronounced as Go). My cousin E was there. Van Gogh was an artist who made his art by drawing or painting little lines to form something in a picture. For our project we used crayons to make a sky. Next, we painted over the crayon with either black or blue paint. Then we got a black strip of paper and cut it out to look like, say, a city skyline or a village or something, and then we glued that to the bottom of the page. When we were done we played. It started raining. On the first day we said that if it started raining we would all run to the driveway and lie down so that when we got up the places where we lay would be lighter than the rest of the ground. It worked and was really cool! When that was over we had lunch and acted as human TVs. We ate on a screen porch, so the if you were acting something out, you would go where there was a square of screen stuff lined with wood and act out a bunch of channels with some other people, while the people inside would change the channels. There was no planning, so none of the people channels knew what the other people channels would do, but we just kind of chose one of the scenes to, such as Sesame Street or opera, and acted it out. It was really fun, but then we weren't aloud to go outside so we couldn't do it anymore. After lunch, we started setting up for the end of camp exhibit thing that we do every year. Sadly, it had to be inside because it didn't stop raining. So we had different areas for each of the artists that we did. This year for the first time our parents could do what we did, too! We made watercolor backgrounds for Salvador Dali, got mud from the creek and small cardboard squares for Jean DuBuffet, put out colored paper and scissors for Escher, and put wet dirt in a little dish so that our parents could shape it for Maya Lin. I don't think there was anything set out for van Gogh. After the exhibit we all went home with our artwork and did whatever we did.

Art Camp Day #3 and #4

Day three of Art Camp was really fun! It was Buffet Day(I brought sushi), and guess what? We studied an artist from France named Jean(Jon with a french accent)DuBuffet. To start the day, we looked at some of Jean's artwork. Then we went down to the creek to get mud and dirt, because those were the kind of materials that DuBuffet used in his artwork. After that we went back up to the art tent and we mixed up a cement-like paint with the mud, glue and regular paint. My original paint was sort of like a teal but with more green. When we were done mixing the paints we drew a pattern or a picture and spread the mixture onto it. B's painting and my painting turned out different, because we splatter painted on top of our patterns. Then we had lunch and we told riddles. Lunch was really good! After we had lunch, we did other things that I forget(sorry).

Day four was also fun(but kind of frustrating). We studied M. C. Escher. As our project we each did a simple(though hard)tessellations. My shape was a square with a chunk taken out of it that was a square that I added on on another side of the square. Doesn't that sound really simple? It's not. You wouldn't know how frustrating it was unless you were there. When we finished our tessellations we had lunch. We also told ghost stories. I think I am losing memories of the afternoons, because I forget what we did that afternoon, too. Bye!

Art Camp Day #2 and After That, Too

Today Art Camp was not as good as it was yesterday. The best part was that it was crazy hair day. B came over to our house this morning(she's our neighbor)and we did our hair together, even though I already had my whole head braided. B suggested that we used pipe cleaners in our hair, so we did that, and it ended up looking really cool. Then we went to camp. The artist that we studied today was Salvador Dali. We made pictures made with images from magazines. First, we made a background with watercolors. Next, we let them dry during recess/snack. After that, we got a lot of magazines and cut out pictures and then put them together to make them surreal. Some of the things in my picture were a man walking down an enormous fern, a headless baby, and a giant frog on a regular sized pumpkin. My background was a red, orange and yellow sunset. After we all finished those, we went down to the stream again and did the same art that we were doing yesterday. B and I started on a different tipi, and so we needed to take the one that we did yesterday down. It didn't get finished, but it probably will be finished before camp is over. Soon my mom came to pick us up and she took us to swim. O, E and C went, too. The place that we went to is really awesome, because it has a bridge thing that you can jump off of. After we swam for a while we went and had ice cream, and guess what? C, E and O were there, too! So we ate our ice cream, then went to my house and we made a little fort that is not yet finished. It's pretty cool and complicated, so I can't explain it. That was what I did today.

Art Camp Day #1

Today was my first day of Art Camp. It was really fun! The art camp that I go to is run by my friend O's mom. I know everyone there. We studied an artist called Maya Lin. She started her career by making the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial. Then she made land art, which is...like art on land, but not using materials from land like leaves or ice or stones(we looked at a book with that later on). Instead, she made dents or mounds in the ground, then grew grass over it. We did something like that. We got pizza boxes and filled them with dirt, shaped the dirt, then planted grass. In between all that we made a scale for it(such as a mini person, animal or tree), and had lunch and break. During break, I jumped on the trampoline, played in the wading pool, played a bit of freeze tag and just walked around. After that, we looked at the book that I mentioned. It had beautiful sculptures. They were just amazing! That inspired us to make our own sculptures with stuff that we find. I made a sculpture with my friend B. It was by the stream in the yard. First, I went in the water, looking for rocks. Then B made a little circle out of them that piled up a bit less than a half a foot tall. E and C(some other friends of mine)and O came over and showed us their work. While we were where they worked, B and I saw some big sticks that weren't being used, so we grabbed them and took them to our building spot. There, we made them into a tipi sort of thing that went over the circle thing, which was daring, because if it fell it would ruin all our work. When that was done, one of O's sisters, I, who was a helper came and suggested that we could make a winding trail out of rocks, so we did that. It ended up really cool, and we might keep working on it, too. Art Camp is really fun!

Water Park

Two days ago I went to this awesome water park with my friend. There were three big slides. You only went down on an inner tube for one of them. For the other two slides, you went either on a mat or with nothing at all. I liked the one with the tubes more than I liked the others. One of the only bad things about the water park was that there was usually a very long line before it was your turn, but the ride down made up for it all. After you waited that wait, you would get ready to go and wait until this life guard guy gave you a signal to go. The water slide twisted, turned, went up, went down(well not really up, actually), and then you would land in a small pool. Here's another flaw:you weren't aloud to play in the pool, but that didn't really matter, because riding down on the slide was better. We went on the slide countless times, then had lunch. I had a cheeseburger and some fried dough. Later, they were giving out free cotton candy, so of course I had that, too. We also played mini golf. I got some good shots, but I also got a really bad one too, where it took me something like seven unlucky shots before I got it in, so I tied in last with my friend. That makes it sound like I'm horrible at mini golf, but there were only three people playing. After that, we went down the water slide a few more times, then went back home. That day was so fun!