Our Space Our Words

I just fed my pet turtle some lettuce.  His name is Squirt and he absolutely adores lettuce. If you give him a massive ball of it he would eat it all up in one day.
   Sitting down with Squirt, I watched the news on telly simply because it was the first thing to come on. The man reading the news always looks so serious, but one day he looked most serious when he said that turtles had started to go missing in London.  I gave Squirt a squeeze like someone was taking him away right now.
   When I went up to bed that night I told my mum what I had heard on the news about missing turtles.
   ‘I’m sure Squirt will be alright.’ Mum hugged me knowing I was scared. I was awake half the night listening for noises.  On the side of the bed I had a baseball bat, just for emergencies.
   ‘Lily!’  Mum came into my room with a cup of hot chocolate and a few marshmallows bobbing inside it. I new it was bad news because mum never gives me hot chocolate unless it was a special occasion.
   ‘What’s wrong?’ I cried with tears in my eyes, even though I didn’t now what had happened.
   ‘Squirt’s not in his cage,’ she whispered.
   ‘No!’  I yelled and ran downstairs sobbing. Suddenly I saw a small card on the kitchen table.  It said ‘animal burglar’ in blue ink. Grabbing it, I opened the door and ran down the street to the shop still in my pyjamas.
   ‘Bella! Bella!’
   I ran in without knocking or saying hello.  I didn’t need to knock because Bella is my best friend and her mum runs the shop down the road. Bella has a turtle too so I was wondering if it had been stolen also. Bella came downstairs from her room sobbing and I knew that the thief had struck here too.  We hugged each other, knowing what had happened to us.
   ‘We have to find this guy,’ said Bella. She suddenly wiped away her tears and grew a bit more confidence.  We both knew it was useless going down to the police station to report the crime. The police had bigger matters to attend to than looking for missing turtles, so we formed our own plan…..
   ‘Right, number 32,’ Bella was saying the next morning.  She ticked the number on her clipboard.  We were asking for everyone who had a turtle to bring it to my house so we could guard it while the thief was still at large.  My mum wasn’t too happy when she came home from work and realised what the situation was.
   ‘Give them all back,’ she said, bundling Bella and I out of the front door with the turtles in a box. ‘I have enough to do without having to protect other people’s turtles.’
   ‘Maybe that wasn’t a very good plan,’ giggled Bella as we trudge up and down our street reuniting the pets with their owners.
   We came back to my house and sat on the sofa. We both sighed. What other plan could we think of now? We needed one that actually worked. Seconds later I had it, and I spat it out at Bella.
   ‘We should catch the thief and become famous.’
   ‘We’d need to catch him red-handed because he’s a clever thief and he is used to getting in and out of people’s houses.’  Bella let my hopes down but then up again.  ‘So we’d need to set a trap that he would fall into.’  That made us both think for a while, then Bella hugged me.
   ‘I know a trap,’ she whispered.
   It was a clever plan.  Later that evening Bella stayed over at my house. The trap was ready.  When I go fishing I have a blue net, the same colour as the carpet downstairs. That is where we would catch the unsuspecting thief, literally.  Bella and I made a model of a small turtle out of polystyrene balls and an old toy helmet which we painted green to look like a turtle shell.  We placed that at the bottom of the stairs and  tuned the light down so low anyone would think it was a real animal.  We made sure it was visible from the window, tempting the turtle thief inside and into the net which he had laid out at the bottom of the stairs.  You couldn’t see that in the dark for sure. Then we hid in the kitchen and we waited for him to come.  But would he?  
   I have no idea what time we heard the lock on the door click. Someone was tiptoeing into the hallway.  Bella and I held each other’s hands tightly. 
   ‘Aaagh!’ We heard a yell and we both of us ran out into the hallway.
   The burglar was at the bottom of the stairs, tangled in the fishing net.  He was squirming and trying to get out.  I was speechless but Bella reached for the phone and dialled 999. The police came really quickly.  The burglar was still trying to untangle himself when they arrived and arrested him.
   ‘We did it,’ Bella and I yelled and hugged each other, for joy this time.  The next morning we heard from the police that all the missing turtles had been found in the burglar’s home and reunited with their owners. Luckily none of them had been injured. Squirt came home and I gave him the biggest ball of lettuce I could find in the shops.  From then on I made sure he slept in my bedroom.  There was no way I was going to have him go missing again.
   A few weeks passed and I went downstairs to the kitchen to make myself some breakfast. I like fixing my own breakfast so I don’t bother mum. When I opened the fridge nothing was in there, no food, no milk, no vegetables in the drawers at the bottom.  There was only a small white card, tucked where the eggs should have been.  I picked it up and slowly read it.
   FOOD BURGLAR!    

Sea turtles are extraordinarily adapted to life in the sea. Their stream-lined shape, large size and powerful flippers allow them to dive to great depths and travel long distances.

The only time turtles leave the sea is when the female needs to lay eggs in the sand. She must drag her weight to the beach, dig a hole, have about a hundred eggs and bury them. It probably takes about three hours to do this.

The next morning the mother is gone back into the sea and doe not come back to check on the eggs ever again. The female turtle buries her eggs to keep them warm so they can hatch.

It takes about two months for the eggs to hatch and when they finally do they go straight out into the sea to start a life. There will be a great adventure ahead of them!

Firstly, I am going to tell you about the best dog to get. It is a dog that does not need much walking and is not very big. This dog is a daschund.

What is a daschund? 

Well, a daschund is a small dog from Germany and it means “Long- badger”. They are mostly called sausage dogs because they are so long,  a bit like sausages! They have very long ears because in Germany they used to dig a lot so the long ears make no bugs crawl into them.

Daschunds’ backs

Daschunds have very long backs which need to be looked after. If they break their spine, they cannot survive. But don’t worry because there are some ways you can prevent this from happening. If you have stairs in your house you must carry them up it, and when you carry a daschund, always carry it horizontally. If you see or carry your daschund vertically it is very bad for its back.

Types of Daschund

There many types of Daschunds you can choose from. There is long haired, short- haired or wired hair. The colours you can get our black and tanned (brown) and tanned. Here are some pictures of what they look like.

Finally, I will sum it up for you. A daschund is a great pet to have but you need to look after it well.   

Do you agree with Lily?  Click on the ‘comment’ link below and let us know. 

By Purnika

You might think that pirates are long gone but they are not.  The pirates have returned to modern days. In the 16th and 17th centuries they often hung pirates for nothing.  Sometimes they even sent to the gallows people who were mistaken for pirates but were not. It was the law in some nations that

Piracy started to develop as soon as vessels which could sail on the open seas were built, especially ones that could sail at a distance from shore. Pirates might have been poor men but they were also smart, as shown by the fictional character Jack Sparrow who seems to have been modelled on some of the most famous pirates in history. Their heyday were in the 16th and 17th centuries, especially in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.  Here there were often battles between the English and the Spanish, who were bought after the gold and silver brought by slaves from the new world. 

Today there are indications that piracy is on the increase in some parts of the world! 

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12 dead, hundreds wounded and an estimated 100 raped, along with hundreds of houses burnt down.  Thousands of locals have left, due to fear of another riot.

In the early hours of Tuesday, conflict broke out between the landlords of Nairobi’s largest slum, Kibera, and gangs of tenants who lived there,  armed with machetes and clubs. This was one of the violent situations  Nairobi has seen for a long time. The cause of this was a disagreement in the price of rent. The tenants in the slum were unhappy that they were being charged so much rent on land that the lords didn’t actually own. Minister Odinga,who was looking for the popularity vote in the next election, saw that the slum dwellers were easy targets, so he instructed the landlords to lower their rent by at least half. They refused because they had been given the land at the beginning of the century, and so they could do what they wanted on it, even if it really belonged to the government.

The  fighting started when, on  Monday night, one slum lords’ tenants wouldn’t pay the rent he asked, a small argument exploded into mass fighting. Police spent two days trying to stop the conflict. Once the turmoil had settled, it was clear that the  damage had been done.

The opposing party Mps, along with most of the Kibera residents, said that Odinga did more damage telling that landlords to lower the rent and not finalize an agreement, than if he had just left the situation. Even after this, Odinga is still demanding that the landlords must half their rent. The landlords are only settling with a 20% cut.

Many residents have no intention of returning to the slum before a proper agreement is settled between the Minister and the slum lords, because they feel that without a cast-iron agreement, another fight is imminent.

Life living in a slum is bad enough as it is without further fighting. The sect gang has been terrorizing the entire ring of Kenyan slums, and their crimes have got so bad that the police have been ordered to  shoot to kill any suspected sect member. 700,000 people living in an area of only four square kilometers sharing only 600 toilets equals giant cesspool. People crammed into smaller and smaller spaces, and with toilets few and far between, many people resort to using “flying toilets” – plastic bags filled with excrement flung as far away as possible. The government every so often bulldoze the edge of the slum to make way for more modern housing . Not only does this squeeze the residents into smaller and smaller areas, but even though the rest of Kenya is benefiting for modernization, the slums are not. The government are spending as little as they can on the slums.

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They roar! They pounce! And if you don’t watch out, they’ll attack! But are the well-known predators really out to make mincemeat out of humans or do we just think that because they eat deer they will eat us? Do big cats really scratch or are there more dangerous creatures in the jungle we should look out for? Do we realize that actually leopards and tigers don’t see us as prey but will only eat us if we are the only thing around! This is because human beings are the only species that kill for the sake of killing. Wild cats will not harm you unless you threaten them or they are really hungry and there is no easier option for food. The thing is, the rainforest is pretty safe animal-wise.

And while you should certainly exercise caution, there are a whole host of other things that you should be more concerned about before you start worrying about tigers, snakes and spiders like getting lost, not falling down a hole and making sure your drinking water is safe, and so on.

What are you afraid of in the rainforest? The true horrors of the rainforest are not big cats or poisonous snakes; they are leeches, mosquitoes, centipedes and rattan (similar to bamboo) that you have to watch out for. You have a smaller chance of being eaten by a tiger than by leeches!

Think of that if you are ever stuck alone in the jungle and you hear a blood-curdling roar among the trees!

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When I interviewed my mum over breakfast I was interested to find out that my mother when she was petite had a rabbit called Wriggly Spearmint. Also I didn’t know that her favourite animal was a horse.

Her favourite colours are metallic grey and any shade of blue. My mother has lots of secrets but one that I didn’t know was her most embarrassing moment…

Which was?

When she tripped over a bit of barb wire in front of some family friends and landed flat on her face.

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Artist or Avocado? 

Paul Martin Geraghty is the well known author and illustrator of many children’s books. He has also written two novels “PIG” and “TINA COME HOME”. At the age of two Paul had invented the language Corkin and he still to this day knows how to speak it. He came over to England from his home town Burban in South Africa 20 years ago and has written books ever since. Paul has two older brother Tim and Steven they are 2 and 4 years older than him.

Paul says that he will never dye his hair and never have plastic surgery. His favourite foods are avocado and potato. Though his favourite colour is turquoise and he prefers his trousers black and blue. Paul has a cat called “Jingles” who he adopted from a policeman. The cat didn’t used to get on with the policeman’s other cats very well. There is also squirrel that Paul knows named Buncle. Paul believes that animals shouldn`t be kept in cages unless it is there for protection.

Paul’s most successful book is Slobcat which was based on his neighbour’s cat Huckull. Paul’s favourite books: ‘Guards!Guards!’ by Terry Pratchet and by him is ‘Dinosaur in danger’.