Our Project

Alex's school sent out an email last Friday to let the parents know that there was a big project due this coming Thursday. With this past weekend being a three-day holiday for the kids, they wanted to make sure the project didn't get forgotten. That was a good thing for us, because Alex really needs plenty of time to work on this type of assignment. He was supposed to show a model of a "coniferous forest" to include the plants and wildlife.

On Sunday, Patrick went out with him and bought the little plastic animals and trees you can see in this picture. We figured that it would be less time-consuming to do this than to have Alex look through all of our plastic figures in the house. He's very distractible and just this task could have taken him a week. It was also less time-consuming than making those things by hand. While Alex was doing research on the computer, he sent Natalie upstairs to look for a rock with moss on it that he thought was in the Playmobil box. After a few trips up and down the stairs, she came back with the large rock formation that you can see in the back left hand corner. It's a little off scale from the trees and animals but again, it was a lot easier to use than finding or making something else.

While Alex was still sleeping on Monday morning, I wrapped the shoebox up with some Kraft wrapping paper. Later when he was doing research on the computer again, I used the reverse side of some wrapping paper to line the bottom of the model. He chose white because that was supposed to represent snow. He then decided where everything was going to go. He even had a raccoon standing over a rabbit that was laying on its side like the raccoon was about to eat the rabbit. He tried to cut out a river but was unhappy with it so I did that for him (the river is at the very front and looks like a shadow with the bad lighting in the study). He positioned some animals to look like they were in the river catching fish for food. When he was "taking a break" I glued everything down. He finished up by labeling everything with number stickers (hooray for my stash of scrapbooking supplies!) to correspond with the numbers on the index cards.

It was late by the time he finished the project completely, but there was enough time to play Mario Kart Wii with his three other siblings. We let the littlest ones stay up past their 8pm bedtime just because Patrick and I enjoyed hearing to their chatter in the game room while they all played together. I only had one more request for Alex--that he put his project in a safe place so his little brother doesn't decide to decorate it himself with markers. Eric does like to color, after all. Oh, and I almost forgot--Alex's reward (or bribe, depending on how you look at it) for finishing his project this weekend was a large Dreamsicle ice cream shake at Brindle's which we went out and got right after he finished.

I felt like I didn't get anything done that was on my "to-do" list, but completing this project will make OUR lives easier this week.