To The Bat Cave

Crichton's class had a special Animal Unit, where they got to pick an animal to research, write a report on, and make some THING for. Crichton choose Bats and we did what modern parents do: we Googled and we Wikipediaed (Wikied? not sure what the correct verbification is - I could look it up). Printed out some stuff and voila.

You remember back in the day: the really lucky kids had a set of current encyclopedias at home, but most of us had to trod to the silly little public library and look up the information, jot down notes (slightly lucky kids could afford to make a few copies to take with them).

For the extra THING, Crichton wanted to use my new shoe box as a Bat Habitat. He took a sharpie and started coloring the box black, but then remembered we had some rocky spray paint in the garage and wanted to use that instead. Now, I felt a little weird about it, but I did the spraying for him as it was too snowy outside and there is SO much junk important stuff in the garage (wouldn't want the giant broken TV or giant broken water heater to get rocky spray painted, would we?). Then, he found a picture of a bat on the internet, printed it out, glued it inside the box, and cut out a square so we can look inside.

"That's all you're gonna do?" I asked.

"That's all there is. It's a bat in a cave."

"You could have a mini-fridge in there with some bananas, insects, and blood..."

He rolls his eyes at me. His mom is getting to be such a dork.

"Really? That's it? OOOooookay."

So, he takes his project to school, they write the reports based on their research, and the teacher puts them all on display for Parent/Teacher Conferences.

Some of the projects are really cute; really good, 2nd grade effort, cute. Like Shoebox Serengeti with a Cheetah family, Whale family hanging from fishing wire in a real aquarium, and Shoebox China with a misshapen play dough Panda. Then, there were a few Big Poster Displays, with computer-printed facts, roughly cut out, and glued on crooked. Then, there was a big fancy pants display board with art-quality pictures, cropped as tho by laser, with matte-like borders and lovely hand written facts, and no missspelled words.

Hmmmm.

Really? You, scraptastic mom, the control freak in you was so threatened by the idea of having your child's 2nd grade artistic abilities on display for all the other moms that you just did it all for them? Did you even let them put the glue dots on the backs of the pictures?

That's the kind of mom who raises a kid who gets drunk and runs over someone's grandmother; then, she helps him bury the body and grounds him to his basement suite for the rest of the day.

Just let your kid do it the way they wanna. How else will they ever be confident and responsible citizens? It all starts with the 2nd grade Animal Project.