Page Type: Elementary

Where can you find a great story? Open a book! Summer is the perfect time for reading. Here are some books you might want to read this summer.

The United Kingdom (U.K.) has a new king! King Charles III will be crowned on May 6, 2023.

King Charles does not need to be crowned to be a king. In fact, he became king when his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, died on September 8, 2022. But every new king or queen in the U.K. is crowned. It’s a tradition that goes back more than 1,000 years.

In the U.K., a king or queen is crowned at a ceremony called a coronation. Coronations take place at Westminster Abbey in London, England. King Charles and his wife, Queen Camilla, will travel to the coronation in a black and gold, horse-drawn carriage. This type of carriage is used only for special events. People will gather to watch the carriage as it goes by.

Will King Charles actually get a crown? Sort of. The royal family has a collection of jewels and other valuable items, including more than one crown. During the ceremony, a crown will be placed on the king’s head. The crown was made in 1661. It is the same crown that was placed on Queen Elizabeth’s head in 1953, at her coronation.

Around 2,000 people will be at the coronation. This includes Charles’s sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, as well as William’s family. For everyone else, the ceremony will be broadcast and live streamed in many parts of the world.

You can see photos having to do with the coronation in the slideshow below!

Maia and Alex Shibutani are amazing. The sister and brother won bronze medals in ice dancing at the 2018 Olympics. And now, they’ve written a book about other amazing people. It’s called Amazing: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Who Inspire Us All.

The picture book tells the stories of 36 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders who have done great things. (Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have ancestors from Asia or the islands in the Pacific Ocean. This includes more than 75 countries.)

Did you know that trees can help control floods? Their roots take in some of the water. This gave one woman an idea. Why not plant old Christmas trees?

Many Christmas trees are cut down, which means they can’t be planted again. These cut trees no longer have roots. Sara Tomkins, who lives in the United Kingdom, decided to plant Christmas trees in pots. These trees have roots. They keep growing, just like houseplants. 

Tomkins has a company called Rooted Christmas Trees. The company rents potted trees to people who celebrate Christmas. People decorate the trees and enjoy them until the holiday is over. Then, they return the trees to Tomkins. Tomkins keeps the trees at her farm all year. She rents them out again the following Christmas.  

At some point, the trees get too tall to fit inside people’s homes. So Tomkins plants them in the ground, in places where floods often happen. She knows that trees can help stop floodwater from reaching towns, where it can do a lot of damage. 

When people heard that Tomkins’s trees were being used in this way, they wanted to rent their Christmas trees from her. Now Tomkins has a lot of customers. They know that their Christmas trees will someday become an important part of the environment.

How do you get from Minnesota to Alaska? You could drive a snowmobile. That’s what three men who call themselves the “3 Old Guys” did! Rob Hallstrom, Rex Hibbert, and Paul Dick drove snowmobiles about 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) from Grand Rapids, Minnesota, to Fairbanks, Alaska. It wasn’t easy, but the 3 Old Guys had a lot of support and a great time.

The 3 Old Guys (they chose that name because they are all in their 60s or 70s) left their homes in Minnesota on March 6. They had planned the route carefully. They would take snow-covered trails northwest into Canada and then Alaska. What they didn’t count on was how many challenges they would face. Even in March, the weather in Canada and Alaska is freezing cold—and a snowmobile provides no protection from low temperatures. Sometimes snowstorms made it hard to find the trails. At one point, a stick got stuck in one of the snowmobiles, and the group had to stop for repairs. 

“Every bend in the river seemed to bring on a new challenge of some sort,” Hallstrom told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). 

But the 3 Old Guys also had plenty of help. When people read about the men’s journey online, they started keeping track of where the guys were. At times, the men would arrive in a small town and find people waiting for them. Sometimes they were given meals and even warm beds.

When Licypriya Kangujam was 6 years old, a strong storm called a cyclone hit her town in India. Soon after, her family moved to a city called Delhi, where the air was very polluted. Licy realized that there were serious problems with the environment all over the planet. She decided she had to do something about it. Now 11 years old, Licy is a climate activist. That means she is working to slow climate change. 

Licy’s own experience taught her that climate change is leading to warming temperatures, stronger storms, flooding, and more. Licy says people have the right to live on a healthy planet. She wants leaders to pass laws to stop pollution such as greenhouse gases, which are causing climate change. 

Licy’s work started close to home. At age 6, she went to India’s Parliament House, where the nation’s laws are made. There, she held a protest to get the attention of India’s leader, the prime minister.

Have you ever tried to solve a puzzle cube, such as a Rubik’s Cube? It’s not easy! But 9-year-old Yiheng Wang of China solved a 3×3×3 cube in seconds.

Yiheng solved the cube at the Yong Jun KL Speedcubing 2023 event in the nation of Malaysia on March 12, 2023. (Speedcubing is the sport of trying to solve the Rubik’s Cube or other puzzles like it in the fastest time.) Each person had five chances to solve the cube. Their times were recorded, and then three of the five numbers were averaged. (The fastest and slowest times didn’t count.) Yiheng’s average time was 4.69 seconds. 

Yiheng set a new world record for average speedcubing time. The old record was 4.86 seconds.

The fastest time ever for a single cube solve was 3.47 seconds. That record was set by Yusheng Du of China in 2018.

An animal shelter in Kansas City, Missouri, came up with a great way to help people get to know the cats that were living there. The shelter, which is called Wayside Waifs, made a very creative video.

In the video, shelter workers were asked to pick a shelter cat that had certain traits. For example, one worker was asked to pick “a cat that loves to cuddle.” She chose a cat named Corduroy. To show that Corduroy loves to cuddle, she stroked the side of his head and he nuzzled right into her hand. 

“It was actually something that one of our feline care [experts] thought of. What kind of animal likes people? What kind of animal would want to snuggle with the other kittens?” Casey Waugh told the Good News Network. Waugh works at Wayside Waifs.

Normally, when people are interested in getting a cat, they go to a shelter website and look at photos. A photo doesn’t show very much about a cat’s personality. So, it’s hard for people to know which cat they might like to adopt just by looking at photos. The video showed the personalities of some of the shelter cats. 

The shelter posted the video on TikTok. It got one million views! Many people wrote comments and shared the video. And soon, the shelter had found homes for almost all of its cats. 

The video was so successful that the shelter made another one. The second video was just like the first one, except that it was about the shelter’s dogs.

Not many baseball players ask fans for their autographs. But when Sergio Romo stepped out to play his final Major League Baseball game, he wore a hat signed by almost 50 young fans. The hat reminded him that no matter where he goes, he’ll always have the love of the fans.

This was a special game for Romo because it gave him one more chance to play for his old team. For nine seasons, between 2008 and 2016, Romo was a pitcher with the San Francisco Giants. He helped the Giants win three World Series. For the rest of his career, Romo played for other teams. Recently, he decided to retire. He signed a special deal to play just one more game, in March 2023, with the Giants.

Before the game, Romo spent a week in Scottsdale, Arizona, where the Giants do their spring training. While he was at the stadium, working his arm, young Giants fans kept asking for his autograph. So he started asking for theirs.

“I was trading autographs with kids,” Romo told NBC Sports. “They asked me, ‘Hey, can you sign this?’ I’m like, ‘Well, can you sign [my hat] first?’”

The kids’ autographs meant a lot to Romo. He realized that even though he had played for other teams, Giants fans still loved him. It was a special feeling to put on the Giants uniform and the signed hat and play that one last game.

“Tonight was just another example of that type of support that I had,” he said after his last game. “I’m thankful for it all. I’m blown away.”

Most people use an oven to make a cake. But not long ago, engineers made a piece of cake with no mixing bowls and no oven. Instead, they used a 3D printer! 

Most printers put words or pictures on paper. But 3D printers create, or print out, three-dimensional objects. Three-dimensional objects aren’t flat. They have a length, a width, and a height. One example of a three-dimensional object is a piece of cake.

The 3D printed cake had seven ingredients—graham cracker paste, peanut butter, strawberry jam, Nutella (a chocolate and nut spread), mashed banana, cherry drizzle, and frosting. All the ingredients had to be liquid. Engineers put each ingredient into a tiny tube. Then the printer squeezed the ingredients out into the shape of a piece of cake, layer by layer. As it printed, the machine used lasers to heat the paste, which cooked it.