Kaitlin was on a field trip to Wynwood Walls today.

Today we looked the United States' decision to evacuate government personnel from Sudan. A group of just over 100 special operations forces were involved in the extraction following a week of heavy fighting between rival military factions in the country. Then, we viewed a profile on the Florida Keys to meet a diver who's on a mission to help bring the area's coral reefs back to life.

Language is a system of communication in which the meaning of the sounds used by a particular group are understood by others who share the language. Sharing a language often means mutual intelligibility, or in other words, you talk to me, and I can understand most of the words you're saying, and vice versa.
A dialect is a variation in a language and may include different ways of pronouncing a word, different spellings, or different choices of words. Various regions will have different dialects. Accents are often part of different dialects. An accent is the way that we sound when we pronounce words. It's important to remember that we're all speaking a variation of a language and that we each have our own accent and the capacity to change ways that we speak if we are exposed to other dialects.
Experts in linguistics look at how languages evolve in this way and how different regions have developed their own patterns of speech.

The three main types of map projections: are azimuthal projections, conformal projections, and equal-area projections. The azimuthal projection preserves the direction from the center of the map and the distance to that center. It is used in mapping out earthquakes and flights from and to certain airports. Conformal projection is a type of projection that preserves angles locally. Maps created using conformal projection are used in sea and air navigation and weather forecast. The Mercator projection is a projection that is widely used, but the relative size and shape of some features are distorted. This type of projection is good for the mapping of small areas. Scale is the ratio of the distance between two points on a map to their actual distance on the Earth's surface. When creating a map projection, selecting the right type of projection depends on what the map will be used for and we reviewed these visuals.

Spatial organization refers to the way areas are arranged on the Earth's surface. The equator is an imaginary line that divides the Earth into the northern and southern hemispheres. We viewed how major horizontal lines of latitude north and south of the Equator comprise the tropics. To the north is the Tropic of Cancer and to the south is the Tropic Capricorn. Kaitlin found their names very odd until I reminded her that navigators named them for celestial constellations. This area was referred to by many early navigators as the "horse latitudes." We then looked at vertical lines of longitude - specifically the Prime Meridian and the International Date Line. Lines of longitude divide Earth into the eastern and western hemispheres and also help to determine time zones.

Holocaust Remembrance Day begins around the world today. We reviewed a bit about of the history of the Holocaust. We even heard one incredible story of survival. Edith Gross was just a teenager when the Holocaust began. She survived immense hardship and has made it her mission to share her story with others. Next Monday, April 24, L.A. schools will be off to commemorate the 20th century's first genocide that happened to the Armenian people during WWI. We take time to commemorate this, as well.

Four astronauts will helm the first crewed moon mission in five decades and have begun training for the historic Artemis II lunar flyby that is set to take off in November 2024. The Artemis II mission will build on Artemis I, an uncrewed test mission that sent NASA’s Orion capsule on a 1.4 million-mile voyage to lap the moon that concluded in December. The crew members, strapped inside the Orion spacecraft, will launch atop a NASA-developed Space Launch System rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The journey is expected to last about 10 days and will send the crew out beyond the moon, potentially further than any human has traveled in history, though the exact distance is yet to be determined. After circling the moon, the spacecraft will return to Earth for a splashdown landing in the Pacific Ocean. Artemis II is expected to pave the way for the Artemis III mission later this decade, which NASA has vowed will put the first woman and person of color on the lunar surface. It will also mark the first time humans have touched down on the moon since the Apollo program ended in 1972. The Artemis III mission is expected to take off later this decade. NASA is targeting a 2025 launch date for Artemis III, though delays may push the mission to 2026 or later. What an exciting time for our country and for those of us who reside in FL to witness these massive lift-offs!

Today Kaitlin was introduced to Harvard professor, Dr. Henry Lewis Gates and his amazing program, "Finding Your Roots." On the program Dr. Gates and his research team meticulously research the family history of his well known guests from all aspects of American life. We watched several today and Kaitlin chose the people she wanted to see meet with Dr. Gates to discover their family roots. The educational value of what Dr. Roots and his team and Harvard do with genetic research and historical records is truly remarkable.

There are musicians out there who have been maniacs with the hooks and brainiacs with the books. Before they were rocking stages, they were rocking semesters at some of the country’s most prestigious institutions. Harvard, Columbia, and Cornell: their halls have laid witness to several stars in the making. Today Kaitlin learned about 8 musicians you may not only know for their success in music, but who received Ivy League educations.

Today we continued with annual Pearson Stanford Testing. We then had some time to review current events.