When Katie Stagliano was 9 years old, she was given a class project to grow her first cabbage from just one seed. She took it home and planted it in her home garden. It didn’t even take her long to come up and begin to grow. But as friends came over, they pointed out that it was bigger than any of theirs. And it grew so much that the cabbage ended up weighing 40 pounds! Katie then decided that she could use this cabbage to do something nice for the community. So she took the huge cabbage to a local soup kitchen, where they used it, and cooked it with ham and rice. And because of her cabbage, 275 people were fed.

She began to realize that gardening and helping people is what she likes to do most. So, she decided to start her first garden on a plot of land donated by her school.

“I think if more kids get to experience gardening they would find out how cool it is and how many people can be fed if you donate your produce,” said Katie. Now, just 9 years later, Katie is 18 years old, and has set up her own business called “Katie’s Krops” with the help of her family friends.

But this doesn’t even come close to the other amazing part. She has raised over 200,000 dollars! And there are over 100 Katie’s Krops within 33 states in the United States. She loves gardening and loves inspiring other children to experience the joy of gardening as well. As of today, her first garden is still doing amazing and is even responsible for supplying over 3,000 pounds of produce donated to local charities. Her goal now? To get 500 gardens across all 50 states.

Going to school looks quite a bit different during the COVID-19 pandemic (流行病). Students and teachers have to wear masks and keep social distance in the whole day. But teachers like Mary Schulz of the West Fork School District in Rockwell, Lowa, still miss the daily greetings that help grow their relationship with their kids. One of the things that Mary missed most was her daily greeting each third grade student with a hug, high-five, or handshake. “When we came back, we hadn’t seen each other in so long and the students just wanted to reach out, you could see it,” she said. “It was just kind of awkward (笨拙的). Maybe you will think the ways of greetings are funny.”

She thought of a clever way to have each of her students come up with a special greeting to start their day! Some of them do a dance move, some simply wave, and others have a difficult foot-tap combination. Mary learned all 20 of their special hellos and now her kids are glad to line up for their daily welcome from Mrs. Mary.

Mary said she has felt more connected with her students since having the daily greetings and the kids just like it! “We’re just trying to have school life with some fun things,” she added. “It has brought me joy too.”

French artist Henri Matisse(1869-1954) was described as “a man ahead of his time” . In honor of the artist, an exhibition titled “Matisse by Matisse” will be held in China this year. It follows Matisse’s works across sixty years.

Originally, Matisse aimed to become a lawyer. He attended law school and worked as a law worker until he came down with a disease in1889. To help him kill time on the road to recovery, Matisse’s mother bought him painting tools. His feeling for color was waken up and he decided to become an artist.

Matisse wanted to create his own style. Instead of painting realistic objects people saw he preferred to express his emotions and feelings toward these objects. One way he achieved this was through using bold(大胆的) colors. In his eyes, colors had more meanings than people would usually think of.

Yet his style was so unusual that Matisse was called the “father of Fauvism(野兽派)” . Even so, Matisse never gave up digging out more for art. Matisse once wrote in the book Jazz that “an artist should never be a prisoner of himself”. In the later years of his life when he suffered from cancer and couldn’t paint, he tried a new kind of art: paper cut-outs. He took brightly painted papers, cut them into shapes, and arranged them in designs. That’s what Matisse called “painting with scissors”.

With great creativity, Matisse’s works have been welcomed and used in many forms of popular art. For example, Yves Saint Laurent, an influential European fashion designer, showed a section of his 1981 autumn-winter collection in honor of Matisse’s works. Now his cut-out patterns and stylish colors are still seen on album covers, T-shirts and in ads.