The Shortest Day of the Year

Today is the shortest day of the year. I made a PowerPoint presentation to explain how the earth's season are caused by the tilt of the the earth. Here are the slides I made.

Review: The Hunger Games

Today I am going to be writing a book review about the hunger games 1, 2 and 3. I hope you enjoy it. :) 

First of all lets get this straight we are not in our world we are in a world of dystopia called Panem.

Ladies and Gentlemen let the 74th annual hunger games begin.

The first book starts with the main character, Katniss Everdeen, describing her home and hunting. It is the morning of her fourth ‘reaping’. A reaping is a annual event that chooses one female and one male from each of the twelve districts to compete in the hunger games which is a tournament where the take twenty four children from the age of twelve to eighteen into an arena to fight to the death. The capitol is in charge of the hunger games and enjoy watching them kill each other. 

The capitol doesn’t treat the districts fairly, apart from district two. During the morning of the reaping Katniss's sister is chosen and she willingly takes her place. The male tribute is Peeta Mellark. After saying goodbye to her family and only friend Gale she boards the train to the capitol with her mentor Hamitch and escort Effie.  

As a big surprise in the interviews Peeta suddenly announces that he loves Katniss. Once in the arena Katniss starts to look for water and shelter and about two weeks in she becomes allies with little Rue and when the careers (highly trained tributes) find out they have blown up their food supply they kill Rue and try to kill Katniss. A week later the game makers announce that two tributes from the same district can win together. Once Peeta and Katniss are together in the arena and have killed the rest of the tributes the game makers announce that only one Tribute can win so they attempt to sacrifice both of themselves but are stoped and are both taken out of the arena and crowned victors together.

Katniss made me feel that I wanted to know what happened to her. She is very brave volunteering for her sister and also quite selfless but at the same time very humble and she was very brave to kill President Coin, the rebel leader. I felt sorry for Peeta because since he said he loved Katniss he is used by everyone as pawn. I also quite liked Johanna Mason and Finnick Odair. Johanna seemed so brave and fearless that it seemed she could do anything she wanted. Finnick on the other hand was different. I felt that he was quite humble and would do anything for Annie. I found Plutarch Heaveansby interesting because of all the courage he had to break out of the capitol with the rebels. The backbone of the book is the realisation that this could be the future and just how awful it would be if it was real. It shows the danger of a small group of people controlling all the wealth and power.

I recommend these books to people who like challenging reads and don’t mind a little bit of violence.

The Winter Solstice

Today I am going to be talking about the winter solstice.

The pagans are the people who celebrated yule. The pagans arrived in Britain around 500 BCE and changed to Christianity around 500 CE. The pagans had lots of different gods all of which  possessed a different power. They would worship their gods in wooden temples or sacred clearings in the woods. They would wear amulets with animal bones or teeth which they believed would give them the power of the animal.  

The winter solstice is the shortest day of the year and the longest night of the year. It is a time celebrate the sun because without the sun there would be no plants and without plants there would be food, oxygen or life. The winter solstice is on the first day of winter (21st December.) The historical tradition started with the fear that fading sun would never come back unless people kept a eye on it and had a big celebration.

The Norsemen saw the sun as a big sacred wheel that changed the seasons. The word for the wheel was ‘houl' and it is thought that is where the word yule came from. On the winter solstice Norsemen would light big bonfires, tell old stories and drink sweet ale. It is known that yule was celebrated long before Christmas. Druids (Celtic priests) would cut the beautiful mistletoe that grew on the oak trees and give it as a blessing (the oaks where considered sacred.) The winter fruits of the lovely mistletoe was a symbol of life in the cold and dark winter months. 

It is believed that the druids started the tradition of the Yule log. They thought that the sun stood still for twelve days and it was thought that the log when lit would conquer the darkness, banish evil spirits, celebrate the return of the sun and bring luck for the next year to come. But the log could also bring bad luck for example if the fire went out before the end of the night disaster would strike the house and if the fire showed someones shadow without its head that person would die within the coming year. 

Even though it was always thought that Stonehenge was made for the summer solstice historians have recently found out it was made for both solstices for more information about Stonehenge look at my post: Day at Stonehenge (probably in older posts.)