Meow

Meow, bark, squeak, caw, neigh, oink, baa!
No, no, don't worry, you haven't entered the blog of a cow, but you have entered a post about Animal Rights. 
Today at Enrich I went to Katie, one of the teachers, to do a workshop on Animal Rights. We started by pondering a snippet of text about animal cruelty. OK, I can't remember every tiny detail, but it went something like this:
A boy is walking his dog when he hears menacing noises behind a high wall. He discovers that the noises are coming from another boy and his dog called Viking. Viking is growling and barking at the boy. The first boy says "Hey, what's the matter with your dog," and the second boy replied, "Oh, he's just acting stupid 'cos he's hurt himself." The first boy looks at an injury on Viking's leg, which is smoking slightly and blackened with bits of horrible dark red. It's a nasty burn. "We were just playing around." Continues the second boy. "What, with fire?" The first boy asks. "Well, really, I was trying to teach Viking to do a trick." The second boy admits. "You know that show on TV where dogs do tricks? Well, the prize if two hundred dollars, and I was really hoping we'd win, but Viking's tricks are lousy, so I tried to make him jump through a flaming hoop, but he won't do it, he burnt himself, stupid thing, he won't do it for a raw steak, or when I refused to feed him for two days, he's lucky he isn't chucked out already for being so stubborn, the useless thing."
The first boy says, "You can't do that," then the two boys have an argument about animal rights. 
So then we made a list of human rights and a list of animal rights. And guess what? The rights were sometimes the same. Both humans an animals have the right to eat, drink, sleep, and have shelter. Animals have the right to not be abused - that was on everybody's list. 
Then we looked at things that were animal tested and how it wasn't really fair that animals had to suffer. We then looked at alternatives, and also watched a couple of clips out of Babe. (I love that movie). So, next time you pick up something off the shelf, you might want to check if it's been animal tested. Would this make you put it back? Everybody will think differently about this. If you like, comment on this post telling me how you would act if you saw that something was being animal tested. 
Bye for now!

Thinker's Keys

Ever heard of the Thinker's Key's? No? Neither had I until we went over it today at Enrich!
We had a Thinker's Key's rotation, and I only got to do two stations, and it was Ridiculous statements like what if we all had the same time zone the whole world I mean and brainstorming and the thing Destiny and I had to brainstorm was how to encourage people to use public transport - 
OOOPS! I haven't even told you what the Thinker's Keys are yet!
OK, so the Thinker's Keys are ways of thinking outside the box. Betcha you've heard of that from nagging, over-ethusiastic teachers, eh?! 'Remember, you need to think outside the BOX, darling!' Sound familiar? Well, it's not a bad thing. Actually, it's a really good thing! It's good to challenge yourself and think outside the box. 
We had a rotation with three stations, Ridiculous Key, Brainstorming Key, and Variations Key. I only went to Brainstorming and Ridiculous Keys. 
First I went to Ridiculous Key. Katie, one of the teachers, put on a clown hat and nose and started acting RIDICULOUS!!! No, no, no, before you start thinking she's mental, she's not. That's not what happened at all! What really happened was that Katie read out some ridiculous statements, and we had to see the positives of that. For example, one of them was, 'What if you could get your driver's license at age six?' We had to find the positives in that. Wilson said that you could show off in your ferrari as you pulled up at school! That would be pretty cool! AJ said you could rev up your car at one in the morning and tick off the neighbors. That'd be cool as well. Somebody said something about your parents drinking, and you could give 'em a ride home! Not so cool if your parents start smooching and acting like drunken idiots in the back seat! But then, somebody else said, you could threaten to chuck them out of the car. You could also put the volume on the stereo up to a hundred and just yell over the sounds of an electric guitar, trying to be heard by your parents who are clapping their hands over their ears, 'Hey, my car, my rules!' How positive!
Next we went to brainstorming. After my last, ah, little joke, you probably won't believe me if I said that Darryn's brain was in a glass dome with lightning sizzling it, so I won't bother trying to trick you. What we did was that first we did a group brainstorm, which is pouring your thoughts out through your brain, down your arm and out the other side of the pen onto the paper. Then we split into pairs and did a brainstorm in pairs. It was really cool! 
Sadly we didn't get to do the Variations Key, but I'm sure it was awesome!

Plant Biology

Today I did a little bit of science with Darryn. The type of science we did was called plant biology, which is pretty stupid, because biology is the study of living things. As in, things that aren't dead. The flowers we studied were dead. See what I mean?
First we looked at what was the purpose of a flower. Bede said that their job was to look pretty. Yeah, Bede, that's right... not really... no...
I guessed that their job was to produce oxygen, which they do. But that wasn't right either. Well, at least I was closer than Bede!
The actual job of a flower is to reproduce other flowers. You see, when a bird, butterfly or bee or something like that (also called vectors) gets in a flower and collects nectar, they then leave and put the nectar they collected elsewhere, which helps to make other flowers.
Next, Darryn started murdering the flower. DARRYN THE KILLER! DO NOT APPROACH! Just kidding! The flower was already dead. What I meant was that he started pulling the dead flower apart. He then looked at it under a Dinoscope. Some close-ups were gross, some were pretty, some were just weird. Then he let us do the same. Here are some of the pictures I took with my Dinoscope:

Sea Shepherds

Today we had a man called Grant come in and talk to us about his job, which is helping to stop the Japanese from killing whales. He is part of a company called Sea Shepherds, who have been doing this for over thirty years.
First Grant showed us a video about Sea Shepherds, which included the head and the founder talking about the company, the number of whales saved each year, clips of them out in boats, pictures of whales and seals. You should have seen the weather. Shudder. 
Then he showed us a slideshow with more pictures, such as ones of the founder with Tim Shadbolt (that picture was in the paper) and pictures of the ships belonging to Sea Shepherds. The slideshow also had snippets of information about laws and loopholes and other countries such as Japan. Actually, Japan was quite a big part of the whole thing, as they kill wales for money, and Sea Shepherds are trying to stop them, so they're sort of enemies. However, Grant also talked about how once a Japanese crew member went overboard, and the Sea Shepherds sent out one of their helicopters to help look  for the crew members. The Sea Shepherds hoped that Japan would do the same for them.

This is the Sea Shepherd logo - Grant had it on his jersey

It was all very interesting, but some of it, like things to do with the laws and rules and loopholes and that sort of thing were confusing, but then we are just Years Three, Four, Five and Six!