Review Unit 7 Chapter Three - Plants and Animals

Title: Review for Unit 7, Chapter 3
Date: circa 1987
Category: School Assignment
Current Status: Recycled

I think this is 6th grade science/social studies material.
I typically saved anything that I considered a "creation." In this case, since I drew (pencil) and colored (crayons) these eight scenes found in nature from scratch, this counts as a "creation."
The art is obviously terrible, but hey, I was 11 and art was never my talent anyway. The perspective in each box is ludicrous and even the crayon use seems below my usual level of quality (I was an excellent crayon user.... I won awards).
In box 1, we have "Tundra" featuring what appears to be a wolf and a bird that flew in from a Picasso exhibit. I guess the green things are shrubs of some kind, but they look more like gelatinous life forms.
Box 2, "Taiga", features a bear... or horse... I have no idea what the heck that is. I couldn't actually remember what Taiga actually is, so I had to look it up. Since it is some kind of cold forest, I guess it's a bear and two squirrels although one squirrel looks like it was cross bred with an aardvark.
Box 3 contains a "Which of these things is not like the other?" style blue sky, an enormous spot of white space which may or may not be a cloud, a raccoon, and some other gray mammal. This is of course, "Temperate Forest." You'll notice my habit of putting tree style vegetation towards the top right corner.
Box 4 contains a scene from a "Tropical Rain Forest" that obviously shows a forest after it was mostly cleared by humans, since there a whopping three trees in it and they are all about 5 feet tall. This forest is inhabited by two snakes and a zombie monkey. Those blue dots might be butterflies... or fairies.
By the time I got to 5 & 6, I must have been getting bored with this assignment as there is less going on in these two than any of the others. "Grassland" has half a tree in the unusually chosen left corner and has a vulture-canary soaking up some rays. Meanwhile, there is an unknown creature near the bottom left that I can't identify. It might be a duck... or a Tremors worm popping up out of the ground. The "Desert," meanwhile, features a cactus, yet another snake, and a turtle. Also note that this is a nighttime scene as you can tell by the floating banana in the gray colored sky.
The last two panels are water scenes. "Marine" shows sea life such as a starfish, dolphin, Barney the Dinosaur, Strawberry flavored jello dessert complete with streamers, and an albino hoagie sandwich. "Fresh Water" presents a serene pond featuring a fish in mid-evolutionary change to a beaver, another freaking snake, the common badminton goldfish, frog, birthday cake for frog, and several plants that lack any root systems and just pop up from the surface of the pond.

You will note that I received an "A+" for this endeavor and also two bonus bunny rabbit stickers. This makes me wonder... when you go to school to get certified to teach children, is there a class you have to take that gives you the sliding scale of low expectations?

*Click on the Image to see a much bigger version and all the great detail*

The "What's the deal with this blog?" post

As some of you may know, I'm a pack rat. I'm probably almost to the point that it's a mental illness, although after seeing the stuff my mom saved over the years, I don't think I'm the worst pack rat ever.
At any rate, since I have been cleaning out Mom's house, I've been confronted with all of the junk I've saved over the last 30 years. While going through some boxes I pulled from the attic, I found a stash that seems largely to be made up of stuff saved from elementary school. I started to just trash or recycle most of it, telling myself that it really isn't worth keeping and nobody on eBay would want it either.
But then I started picking stuff up and thinking about why I kept it in the first place. Sometimes, I had no idea why I kept it, but usually, I could put a story together explaining the value I placed on it. Birthday cards, souvenirs from trips, art from school, assignments that particularly amused me, newspaper clippings... just random stuff, uncategorized, but I could still think of words that would accurately reflect why I had saved it (or at least, why I thought I saved it).
Since I was practically writing blog entries in my head as I looked at each item and tried to determine why it was in a box in my attic, it occurred to me that it might be fun to create a digital archive museum both for myself (so I could "keep" said useless item without taking up physical space in my house) and to share with any other hapless victim that might be amused by looking at a collection of junk accumulated by one person through the late 1970's to the 21st century.
Some of these will be kind of mundane, some of them will just be ludicrous. Some of them will cause me to start telling stories that really have nothing to do with the item, but might be amusing anyway.
Anyway, maybe people will read some of this and maybe not. Either way, I'm preserving some of my childhood.