Tag Archives: Tennis ball planet

Storied Planets

One of the books we read during language arts class at Durham Academy is The Last Cuintista by Donna Barba Higuera. The Last Cuentista is about a girl named Petra Peña who, along with her family and hundreds of others, has to travel to a different planet to escape from an incoming asteroid that would soon destroy Earth. After waking up on the ship in which she left home, Petra realizes she is the only person who remembers Earth and must use storytelling to keep both her Hispanic heritage and overall human history alive. An important theme in The Last Cuentista is how keeping stories going is vital to understanding the history of humans. In addition, stories are vital in learning and understanding more about people and their culture in general.

After this 3 month long book project, my language arts class took up another challenge, creating our very own ideal worlds. During this project, I imagined a whole semi-realistic (but not really) world, wrote a report on my planet, its political system, and things you can do there, and drew an illustration of my WHOLE planet. Overall, I enjoyed this project because of the creativity I could put into it from imaging and designing my planet to writing a six paragraph report about my planet’s goats and Glacier Frost Gatorade Cherry river.

I may have enjoyed this part of creating my very own Ideal World, but what came after this was even better… turning our six paragraph report into a 3D handmade book! We cut, glued, and painted with the help and support from the well known artist, Peg Gignoux! We started this book by akua ink printing on several different pieces of paper from graph paper to music pieces. After this, we cut out different shapes to get ready for the next step, gluing and collaging. We started gluing and collaging the different shapes and sizes of paper we cut out earlier into rocket ships, Gatorade rivers, aliens, and anything else you can imagine! Finally, after we were all finished with the insides of our 3D books, we glued on the cover, decorated them, and added the finishing touches to all of our amazing, creative, and kind of sticky, 3D books.

I would just like to give a big thanks to Peg Gignoux for helping me create my 3D Ideal world and Mrs. Donnelly for both planning the whole unit and for helping me keep my writing neat and legible.




My Ideal World

Hello and welcome to Planet Penn. My name is Deuce and I will be your tour guide for today. Grab your cameras, because we will be exploring the natural, technological, and political wonders of Planet Penn. Oh, and thank you for touring today with Planet Penn tours.

We are now passing one of nature’s greatest treasures, the massive glacier frost Gatorade cherry river! Not only is this river massive, but it sustains over half a billion goats worldwide. As you can see, the goats are not only drinking the Gatorade, but they are also eating the planet plant… GRASS! But this grass isn’t just any random grass, this grass is bouncy and lets the average person jump six feet in the air!

Here we are at our first stop, tennis town. One of tennis towns biggest tourist hits is the court. This may just sound like a big room with a bunch of judges but going to court on Planet Penn is a lot different here than anywhere else. Let’s say you and your friend had an argument, you go to court and play a tennis match to see who is right. And don’t worry about unfairness, because everyone has equal power at Planet Penn. You may also find hundreds of smoothie shops all around tennis town. Smoothies are a legacy at tennis town and are part of everyone’s diet. Oh, and don’t worry about how fresh the fruit is, the fruit is freshly shipped in from Planet Prince.

We are now here at our second stop, Planet Penn’s Match-Point Mountain! Match-Point Mountain is a popular tourist attraction because of the amazing view of Planet Prince and the yearly Overhead Open. Everyone in the galaxy of II Serve can come and compete at the Overhead Open for the Clay Court Cup. The galaxy of II Serve is huge and is home to thousands of planets, which makes this tournament the largest tournament in the universe. Last year the finals were against Ace who plays for Planet Penn and Ad who plays for Planet Prince. This was a very exciting match because Planet Penn and Planet Prince orbit each other in the galaxy of II Serve. Ace finally won the match 3 sets to 1 set.

Here we are at our third and last stop, our biggest company, Triple T or Tennis Town Tech. Here Planet Penn’s amazing scientist invented the huge, luxury, racket ships you probably got here in. These racket ships are the biggest in the galaxy and have amazing technologies within them including our 60 mph moving walkways through the strings of the racket and a humongous jet that can carry a huge ship and thousands of people from planet to planet. Tennis Town Tech has other amazing technologies including outer space tennis which is exactly how it sounds and the Apple phone 2554 which you can now ride on!

Thank you for flying with Planet Penn tours and we hope to see you again soon. We hope you learned lots about Planet Penn. Don’t forget your cameras!