This was Krypto's final paper for the school year. He read a book about Marie Curie, outlined it on his own, and wrote a rough draft with no help. I made some grammar and spelling corrections with him looking on, so we could discuss it and learn where his errors were, and he then made those changes to his paper. This is his final draft.
I am very happy with all the effort that he has put into his writing this year.
Happy End of 4th Grade, Krypto!!!
Marie Curie was born
on November 7, 1868. She was the last of five children, her family was poor and
their house was an apartment, there were four girls, and one boy. Though her family had no money to send her to
school, she was very bright, and her mother taught them to read and write. She
proved how bright she was when her eldest sister, who was ten at the time, stuttered
with a book. Marie, who was five, read the sentence her sister couldn’t read
with perfect clarity. Unfortunately, Marie’s mother died of tuberculosis when
Marie was only seven.
Without her mother to
teach her and because she had a burning desire to learn, she taught herself
from the books around her house. But, she
was still too poor to go to school, so the moment she was old enough, she took a job as a
governess. It took three years to save up enough to go to the college of her
dreams, the Sorbonne, which was a very well respected French college. Nobody thought
she could pass, but she did, with a diploma in Chemistry. At the time, Uranium
was the only known radioactive substance, and all that people knew about it was that
it sent out waves. When Marie worked with some Uranium she discovered that some
of it wasn’t Uranium! By testing, she discovered that one percent of the
rock that she was holding was four times more radioactive than uranium, so she
called it Radium. She also discovered radioactivity could kill cancer and that it also
causes cancer.
During the time she
was working with Uranium, she also got married and had two children. Unfortunately,
her husband died by being crushed under the wheels of a carriage. She and her
daughters were very sad. A few years later she fell in love again. But, the guy
was already married and the newspapers attacked her because of this. Other papers claimed
that she hadn’t actually discovered radium, but had stolen the papers from
another professor. She tried hard to defend herself, but it was actually her
government friends that saved her.
During World War I she helped soldiers using the new X-ray invented and inspired by her work on
radioactivity. She helped save 30,000 people from dying. After that she went to
America and met President Harding, hundreds of newspaper reporters, and even
Thomas Edison!
Marie Curie died on July 4, 1937. No one really knows how she died, but many think she died of radioactive poisoning. She won 2 Nobel honors, and greatly advanced the fields of Medicine and Chemistry.
