Journal entries from Chris Rowan's Kids

Adriana's journal entry

10/22/96
Hello. My name is Adriana Serrata. During this week our class has been learning a lot about Mars. The first day we started learning about the "Red Planet." We made a journal. Then we started to write things we could write about and wrote a few notes. We also made a time line. Now we know what homework we have, and that is very easy in my opinion. We also made a glossary so when we read he would tell us if it was a glossary and we would write it down and tell us the definition. We also made a chart so we could know what time to look for Mars.

10/23/96
Today we made a model of the solar system. Too bad we did not get to Jupiter. At least we got to Mars. When we were going to Jupiter, well trying to get to Jupiter Rossi was dancing and Chris said "A planet is moving." He said that because Rossi was a planet, Earth. We read more on our books Mr. Rowan gave us and got a lot of glossary words. Last of all we made little planets and we were suppose to finish but I did not get to.

10/24/96
Today I finished coloring and pasting my planets to a sheet of my journal. We had a lot of fun playing with the computer programs about the planets. On the computer I was on I could see little films about the nine planets. On Mars I got to see the texture which I had never seen. I never knew that Mars texture had many craters. Venus had a texture that nobody could see because of I think thick clouds. Then one of NASA's missions found out that the texture was with lava. I soon got bored of this because I had seen all of the films. So I went to the computer Karla was at. We both saw a rhyme with all of the planets' first letters in order.
It went like this: My very elegant mother just sat upon nine porcupines. My mom told me one too-- it goes like this: My very elegant mother just served us nine pizzas.

Roxanna's journal entry

What I Did..... 10-23-96
Well, I did so much on space. I think it is so INTERESTING to learn about space because we could never go to unless were a astronaut. With all that Mr. Rowan (my teacher) seems like we were there. Him and his wonderful mind come up with so many FUN but still learning activities. One of his fun but still learning activities was to go out on our Morningside Elementary grounds and make a 1 billion size smaller model of the planets in their order. When we did that activity I was the sun. While I was pretending to be the sun I was day dreaming. I was day dreaming about how the planets must be so far apart. OH, and did I tell you that we got less than half way to Pluto.

More Fun Stuff........ 10-24-96
Well today was not as fun as when we did the planet activity. WELL, I had a sort of better time looking through a cd that Mr. Rowan went to a Mars Team Online conference in Washington D.C. Mr. Rowan was one of the two teachers chosen from Texas to go. The name of the cd was Mars Navigator by JPL Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

I got to see some movies about the Pathfinder Missions. I met the workers and the workers always said a little bit about themselves. I also read about missions before like the Viking. I thought there wasn't much to learn about space but I was proven wrong. There are so many things to be learned about space.

Lee's journal entry

WHAT I HAVE DONE...... 10-25-96 By Nephtali Alonzo
The past three weeks or so my class, my teacher (Mr.Rowan), and I have been doing a lot of interesting activeties about space. Just the other day my whole class walked outside and checked how far the planets really are. We cut out a Sun with a diameter about the size of a yardstick and took it outside. Then Mr. Rowan (my teacher) cut out little planets. Pluto was the size of a dot!

So we all walked outside and in our Mars Exploration Booklet it said how far the planets are from each other. And we figured out that the planets are so far away that walking our whole campus is not even half way to Jupiter! That really suprised me.

And yesterday we used our computers and Mr. Rowan put a disk in called JPL Mars Navigator. On that disk we saw and heard a short movie of a rocket launch on the computer. That is some of the stuff we did in the past three weeks.