school projects and such

Over the Easter break, Mac had an assignment to create a poster, book, or diorama to tell about his chosen animal's habitat. There were specific questions to be answered, like food, predators, temperature regulation, etc. The poster had to be in the child's handwriting and had to be in complete sentences.

He chose the stingray. Not the most exciting animal in the world, but better than his first choice of a snake.

Now you may recall the trauma I suffered from the kindergarten letter poster project in Sao Paulo. Allow me to refresh your memory by going here. Or just cut to the chase and see the poster below.

For your basic Grade A perfectionist, aka moi, this was less than a stellar result because I knew my boy could do better. And then when I saw some of the other posters... well, let's just say that I couldn't allow that to happen again. (Just so you know the level of competition I'm talking about, one poster of a child whose mother is Japanese had all of its letter objects in origami form. No, I'm not kidding. It was stiff competition in kindergarten.)

So Mac picked his animal and said he wanted to do a poster. Whew. No diorama business with styrofoam and spray paint for us.

The three of us went to Target as a family unit on a supply-buying mission. (Can you tell I was just hanging out with Jimmy, who's been hanging out with only military people over the last 8 months?). We found this awesome blue (for the ocean) foamcore poster board, construction paper and markers for the occasion.

Then I had what I thought was a moment of brilliance and said we could make templates of other sea animals on the construction paper and Mac could write all the required information on a bunch of these animals that we'd display around the stingray that he was going to draw and cut out. Great idea, right?

I have to tell you that we were all so proud of this poster upon completion. We wasted a few animal templates because of misspellings and general frustration, but the finished product was fabulous. Mac loved it and I loved it. Jimmy said he thought we both deserved an A. Behold Mac's work of art:

We proudly delivered the poster to his classroom on Monday (along with his stuffed animal stingray from the aquarium which was to be used as a prop next to the poster). His teacher oohed and aahed over it, and I left feeling fairly smug.

Until I turned the corner and saw one of his classmates and her mother wrestling a tri-fold poster (like we used in the science fair in high school) and the most enormous diorama you've ever seen. It must have been the top off of a refrigerator box or something. HU.MON.GOUS.

Panic set in. Did I misread the directions? Were we supposed to do the poster, diorama, and book? I went off to my cardio tennis class on campus and ran into a school mom-friend and she asked if we'd turned in our posters. I said yes and we immediately and simultaneously asked if we'd seen any of the other children's work. She, too, had seen the same mother-daughter team come in. We laughed it off as "overachieving moms", of which I thought I was part of that group, but clearly do not meet the qualifications.

The next day, I picked Mac up from school and we walked through the hallway where all the projects are displayed. I should have taken a photo as proof that I'm not exaggerating, but we definitely should have spent spring break fishing for stingrays so we could bring in a live sample or at least a dead sample or maybe the barbs from a tail or something. There were deer head skeletons, dioramas with styrofoam cut out to look like mountain ranges with streams built in and bears off lurking in the distance, pictures of what looked like a pet chipmunk, etc. You get the drift, right?

I will say that Mac's poster was the most colorful. I'm still enormously proud of our effort - it really could win "most creative" - but I'm obviously operating at sub-par level compared to these other moms. Second grade poster project: look out because we are owning it next year!