Xpress, the Coolest Section of the St. Petersburg Times, is the home for features, news and views of interest to young readers. Most of the work in Xpress, which appears on Mondays in Floridian, is produced by the Times' X-Team. The team of journalists ages 9-17 from around the Tampa Bay area is selected every year at the end of the school year to serve during the following school term. The current team of 12 was chosen out of 150 applicants. Watch for X-Team application forms in Xpress during the month of May.
Read the reviews by Xpress Film Critic Billy Norris
Contest is out of this world
By Times Staff Writer
Published April 5, 2004
Time is running out in the Xpress contest to include Sedna in a sentence that helps kids remember the planets in our solar system.
Wednesday is the deadline to submit entries to the contest in which we asked readers to come up with a sentence that helps people remember the names of the planets, including little Sedna, a planetlike object 8-billion miles from Earth, recently discovered by scientists.
One common sentence is, "My very energetic mother just served us nine pizzas." The first letter in each word matches the first letter of each planet in our solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. Learning the sentence is a way to memorize the names of the planets.
If Sedna turns out to be a planet, we may need a new sentence to help us remember the names. So send in your entries. Your sentence MUST be original, so you can't just say "My very energetic mother just served us nine pizzas, sweetheart."
Send your entries by Wednesday to A Planetary Puzzler, c/o Xpress, P.O. Box 1121, St. Petersburg, FL 33731. Or e-mail entries to robinson@sptimes.com Make sure you put A Planetary Puzzler in the subject line. Please include your name, age, grade, school, your address, phone number with area code and an e-mail address, if you have one. And please, moms, dads and grandparents, resist the temptation to be a kid again and enter yourself.
We'll print some of our favorites in Xpress. And the winner will get a prize. Good luck!
