Part of what I enjoyed most about Hello Universe was the character Kaori’s interest and belief in her psychic ability. It really seems like she’s just grasping at straws most of the time, but she does turn out to be right about a few things. She doesn’t believe in coincidences, it must be fate. She refers to astrology in the story and finds all of their astrological signs important in knowing about their character. So I looked up the constellations for Kaori, Virgil, and Valencia’s signs and drew them all together for Make 3.

I started with characterizations associated with each astrological sign. They fall in line with their actual characters for the most part! I then wrote the sequences of events that they each took place in that led to Virgil’s search and rescue and their eventual joining as friends. I’m not entirely happy with the outcome of this make. I think there could’ve been an easier and more simple way to do it. But I think it looks pretty good and I enjoyed looking up and drawing the constellations at least!

Sometimes, it’s hard to look back on the best things that have happened in your life and not think that it’s pure coincidence. There’s just some people and events that nearly seem to be carefully placed in your life path on purpose. I know I’ve thought about how if my next door neighbor hadn’t gotten locked out of her house, I may never have met the people that became my life-long best friends. And how if I hadn’t uprooted my life to move to Chico, then I would have never met the man of my dreams. This book certainly has the same sort of  life occurrences that eventually leads to something good. To me, it also seems to give a message that the parents you’re born from may shape who you are as a person and the alignment of stars in astrology may closely resemble the type of person you are and to most people’s beliefs dictate your qualities as a human being. However, these kind of things don’t have absolute control over you. You can be outspoken when needed even if you’re typically shy as a Pisces and you can face those fears you’re not aware of, but find a way to sneak into your dreams as a fearless Scorpio. It may be pure coincidence. But maybe sometimes life sets you up to triumph your personal obstacles and gets you to the right people and places you always wanted.

The Strange Case of Origami Yoda is a case file consisting of personal accounts of Dwight and Origami Yoda from various kids attending McQuarrie Middle School. They all have their personal opinions on Dwight and whether they think Origami Yoda is a higher power fueled by the Force, or just Dwight which seems nearly impossible to them. I made a case file specifically on Dwight made up of the other students thoughts on Dwight and things they know about him. I think it went pretty well! About halfway through though, I was getting frustrated about their opinions on him and their belief that there’s no way it was him, when it obviously was. So I thought something a teacher could do is have their class make up a case file based on their personal opinions and observations. Mine personally would be more like Dwight is a hilarious, eccentric kid that only wishes the best for others in the end. I was able to draw the conclusion from this Make Cycle that Dwight uses Origami Yoda as a way to talk to other kids and make friends while still being able to be his weird, yet awesome self that they weren’t ready to accept. That could be useful in a classroom setting and you could also do one on Origami Yoda as well as the other characters in the story!

My artifact is something I drew and traced of a picture of red riding hood’s coat. (The picture is the featured image of the article.) Although the coat isn’t featured in every Little Red Riding Hood’s stories, it’s a major identifier encompassing her story that we know and love. I then went through our blogs and picked out words we used to describe Little Red Riding Hood, her story and the lessons or morals we grasped from the stories. I got this idea from the book we read the first week of class, Love that Dog, where Jack made a picture of his dog using words and lines.

My initial plan was to have all the words with darker meaning in the black portions of the coat and the more positive labels in the red portion of the coat. However, it turned out there were way more words leaning in a negative light so I ended up throwing most of them in the red color. Some of the words I actually even have in both colors such as society and innocent since, depending on the way you look at it, the meaning or circumstances can go either way with her and her story.

This took much more time than I had anticipated. I also wanted to include Cinderella’s shoe, but I felt happy with what I had already in consideration of time! I just wanted a visual of composed words we assigned to her story and labeled her character that could be compared and contrasted. There’s definitely quite a spectrum that makes it very difficult to pinpoint the answer to: what the heck is going on in the story of the Little Red Riding Hood?