【推荐1】Join our Sail Design Competition and Help Us

Clean Ocean Sailing is a voluntary organization whose aim is to clean our coasts and raise awareness about ocean plastic pollution. They have repaired their sailing boat, Annette, to carry out their important mission and she needs a new sail and your help. This new sail will propel (驱动) her over thousands of miles for the next 10 to 15 years. We’re calling on artists with a vision for happy, healthy oceans to submit sail designs for the Clean Ocean Sailing team.

Please tag @stroodles straws and @cleanoceansailing, and use #MakeASplash so we can see and share your work! Please submit your artwork by June 30th, 2023, 23:59.

A nice box worth £100+ and your design on the sail for 10+ years!

【推荐2】The Astra International Picture Book Writing Contest is a unique competition open to writers for children. We believe that in our increasingly digital age it is more important than ever for children’s first books to introduce them to the pleasures and power of storytelling and the written word along with outstanding visual art. Being exposed to the best picture books can create in young people a lifelong love of reading. By rewarding and showing excellence in the art of picture book writing, we aim to inspire writers to focus on the picture book text as an art form in itself, and to raise the quality of these seemingly simple books for the benefit of children everywhere.

The winners will have the opportunity to sign publishing contracts (合同) with the sponsors to publish the manuscripts (原稿) in different languages. Each winner will be required to agree that sponsors have a one-year priority option to publish their manuscript to receive the cash prize.

For more information, please contact us: astrawritingcontest@readinglife.com.

【推荐3】Youth Wildflower Art Contest

Have wildflowers ever inspired the inner artist in you? Shenandoah National Park’s annual Youth Wild flower Art Contest is coming again! This year’s artists can share their creativity by uploading their entries (参赛作品) online.

Who

The contest is open to all K-12 students (including home-schooled students) in the following counties (县):

Albemarle, Augusta, Greene, Madison, Page, Rappahannock, Rockingham, Shenandoah and Warren.

What

Each student may submit one piece of artwork. For the subjects of their artworks, artists must use wild flowers that are native to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Shenandoah National Park. To help you choose, we’ve put together a list of native wildflower species.

Submissions must be on flat media, and may include watercolor, pencil, fabric (织物), etc. Photographs, computer-generated, or computer-enhanced artworks will not be accepted. Works will be judged on the basis of original designs and artistic compositions.

If you’d like some art tips before getting started, be sure to check out our virtual wildflower water color workshops with artist Betty Gatewood.

When

We will kick off National Park Week with accepting submissions! You can submit your artwork from April16 through May 4. The winners will be notified after the judging process has been completed.

How

You can get started any time with your work! Participants will upload an image or scan of their art works online through Call for Entry website.

In order to upload your artwork, you must first sign up for a free Call for Entry account. After creating an account, you can upload your artwork. Detailed instructions for uploading artwork may be found on the website. Last, follow the instructions for applying to the contest and you’re all done.

Questions

Email shen_education@nps.gov for more information and questions!

【推荐3】Blue whales are the largest animals on the planet, and each year they undertake (进行) one of the longest migration (迁徙). After spending the summer in the Northeast Pacific, the whales travel thousands of miles to their breeding (繁殖) grounds off the coast of Central America.

To learn more about these behaviors, William Oestreich, a PhD candidate in biology at Stanford University, and his colleagues planted an underwater microphone, or hydrophone, just outside Monterey Bay and recorded whales’ songs over five years.

Only male blue whales are known to sing, but both sexes move southward at about the same time each year. Males and females have also been spotted pairing up and feeding together shortly before the migration begins. “That gives us some confidence that the sounds that are primarily being produced by males are fairly representative of what the whole population is doing,” Oestreich says.

During the summer, the songs picked up by the hydrophone took place mostly at night. The intensity of the songs reached the highest level each year between October and November. However, as winter approached and the songs dwindled, the whales changed to singing during the daytime. In the summer, blue whales spread out over vast distances while searching for food. By eavesdropping on (窃听) their distant neighbors at night, the whales may gather information about food conditions elsewhere in their range. Knowing when other whales are on the move could guide their decision about when to stop hunting for food and start their own journey toward milder waters.

By turning in too, we might be able to forecast when the whales will arrive in areas where they’re in particular danger of running into ships, such as the Santa Barbara Channel. “There have been quite a noticeable number of deadly collisions (碰撞) between ships and blue whales,” Oestreich says. “That could be one piece of the puzzle (拼图游戏) to more dynamically (动态地) managing those habitats and shipping paths in a way that allows shipping to continue, but also in a way that is safe for these whale populations.”