WW #2: A Peruvian Pause

Today should be my third Weekly Wrap-up, but oh well!

I look back on the version of me who thought I was going to write articles while in Peru with the kind of patronizing tenderness that can only come from experience. Reading over my last Weekly Wrap-up, I find myself thinking, “Aww, it’s so sweet that you thought you’d actually have time to do that!”

It’s a fairly short post today, since my media consumption has gone down while we’ve been hopping from travel nightmare to event to tour to event and on and on since I last posted.

Fun Events

My husband’s elementary school friend married a woman from Peru and we were invited on the trip of a lifetime—her family runs a travel company in Cusco and planned such a beautiful trip for us all! We met some amazing friends and got to take part in Inca culture and traditions, like taking part in the Pachamama (Earth Mother) ceremony and dancing with Qhapaq Qolla performers at the wedding.

Brian and I with the Qhapaq Qolla dancers—I danced with the guy next to me in the ski mask for about three minutes and was out of breath for an hour

Cusco has been on my bucket list since college when I took an Inca History course, one of those classes that turns out to be a pleasant surprise—I needed a writing course and found one of my favorite history topics! It was fascinating to learn about the ingenuity, creativity, and artistry of the Inca people by visiting temples like Qorikancha, ruins like Machu Picchu and Saqsaywaman, and the Inca science lab of Moray.

Machu Picchu!

It’s theorized that Moray was used as an agricultural laboratory, designed to recreate the microclimates found across the Inca Empire. Each section and terrace has different temperature and moisture levels, shaped by factors like soil drainage and exposure to sunlight. As a result, some areas may have mimicked sunny, dry high-altitude conditions, while others recreated cooler, shadier, and wetter environments.

Creative Endeavors

I may not have written anything the past two weeks, but I have been building! I’m about to share an app I made that generates short stories for reading practice for kids K-5.

I’ll share a deeper dive on how it looks when it’s out, but here’s a quick rundown: the user shared the reading level of the child, whether they want the story to be fiction or non-fiction, the topics the child is interested in, and how many pages the story should be. That information is given to Claude, along with relevant data about how many words should be on a page and other factors that contribute to generating a passage for the proper reading level.

Once the passage is generated, it passes through the grade level appropriateness evaluator from Learning Commons to ensure that the generated text is appropriate for the child. If this check fails, the prompt is sent back to Claude with the feedback from the evaluator to regenerate the passage.

Once a story passes the evaluator, it is available for download as an unformatted docx file or a formatted pdf that uses the reading level to determine the font size and line spacing.

I have a running list of v2 ideas and expansion projects that I’m excited to implement once v1 is published, and I can’t wait to share my iterations! I’m planning on sending v1 to some of my teachers friends to get feedback on what could be adapted to better suit them in the elementary classroom.

Also, I’ve started painting another light switch cover, this time for the kitchen. It will be green with little vegetables on it, and it will be beautiful! I’ll likely share this next week :)

Hope your week is lovely y’all!

Cassidy🧡