Super Chunk

My kids came home today with posterboard and an assignment to create a poster about a rainforest animal.  We were provided with an animal to research and some very basic information about the animal.  This project was supposed to take a week, but we’re darn near done.  This is not because of our superior research skills or our dedication or the presence of a trained librarian in the house… no, it is because my children are evidently push-ahead kind of people and I have very little control over them.  Here’s the story of the afternoon:

• I pick up kids at school.  Becky shows me rolled-up posterboard and says there is a special project to do, but we should wait to talk about it until we get home.  Adam says nothing.
• We get home.  I begin to fix a complicated snack for Becky because she pulled the recipe out of a cookbook last week and I totally promised.  Snack involves individual tortilla chips, each with a spoonful of refritos and a spoonful of salsa, but not the guacamole that was suggested in the book, because that would have to be homemade at this stage.
• Adam comes into the kitchen waving a rolled-up posterboard and says, “I have to give this back to Mrs. D. tomorrow about a hummingbird.”  I surmise that this is a research thing and begin to hurry my snack prep.
• I go into the dining room, salsa spoon in hand, to find that Adam has drawn sort of a bird-thing, a stick-tree, and a dot-flower, all in blue.  (Cute, and the bird-shape is a fairly good one.)  I suggest that he add some captions and return to the kitchen to throw the salsa on the baby tacos because This Is Not Going To End Well.  I pull the bird book from the shelf and encourage Adam to page through the hummingbird pictures.  I also suggest that he add, you know, wings.  (He does add one; it is tiny and green, and in his defense the bird is shown in profile.)  (He also adds a bunch of black dots and the word “BLIZZARD!”)
• I skim the assignment page, which indicates that this is due in one week, not one day.  Time is fluid when you’re five.
• Becky grates cheese for her snack until she doesn’t want to anymore.  Meanwhile, I talk with Adam about the information he would like to include on his poster (luckily, he left about a third of the posterboard empty); he is all for copying what was on the little slip his teacher gave him.  We talk instead about writing down words that a kindergartner might say, and he begins a list.  First list item is copied verbatim from the slip.
• I place the poster-in-progress on a high shelf so I can finish the snack and still be involved in this project.  (Please note that I DO NOT CARE about this project.  And I also don’t have any kind of a thing about “my baby needs my help with homework.”  No, kindergarten does this project every year, and about three-fourths of the posters are done by parents, natch.  I’m not going to do it for him, but it is within my power to make sure that he includes some real information and does not toss off some random drawing of a hummingbird driving a racecar up a tree in a snowstorm.  I can slow him down where necessary, and that may turn out to be my entire role in his life.)
• I have to grate the rest of the cheese.  Baby tacos go in the oven, and I return to my duties as mom-thesaurus.  Adam and I determine that hummingbirds are tiny and fast, and that they sip nectar because they need to eat it.  This seems reasonable to me.
• Just in time, I remember to get the snack out of the oven.  Becky eats while I draw guidelines on Adam’s poster and remind him to use his nicest handwriting and go slowly.  That message sinks in around line four, but what the hell.  At least it sinks in.  (I am asking now: who told my kid that he should trace the end of his finger for the curve on a lowercase F?  I’m not sure how I feel about this plan.  OTOH, it is a nice curvy F.)  (Also: the first line was about hummingbirds being fast, and the Adam drew little motion lines around the letters. Adorable.)
• Becky keeps eating.  Adam writes his name (very small, at my suggestion) and the date at the bottom of the poster, where he has added some grass.
• Becky finishes her snack and pulls out her rolled-up posterboard.  Attached is an assignment sheet and a slip of paper with a tiny bit of information about the Jamaican fruit bat.  ???  We page through the end matter of Stellaluna and find that fruit bats are often called flying foxes because they have pointy noses and big ears.  She writes this down, and we paraphrase some other information from the slip… such as “they can fly” and “they live in the top of the rain forest.”  She isn’t interested in mentioning that bats are mammals, or that these particular bats eat fruit… because, she says, “We just said they’re fruit bats.  Of course they eat fruit.”  Of course.  OK.
• Becky draws a sketch on scratch paper (only because I wouldn’t let her start with markers on her final copy) of an upside-down bat hanging from a branch.  It is adorable, though somewhat lacking in definition (i.e. the body is only suggested by the legs).  She asks for help drawing the wings.  We decide that the upside-down bat will be centered on her poster, and the information can go on the wings themselves.
• Once we get past the branch-that-is-half-the-width-of-the-page and turn the posterboard over, Becky draws her bat.  She wants to color it with rainbows.  We check the internet to make sure that this isn’t actually a valid option.  (FYI: Bats are pretty much brown.)  We discuss the fact that Work for Display should be one’s nicest work and not scribbly, if one can help it.  “But Mom,” she says, “YOU color like that.”  Yeah, and I’m no longer in the business of posters for the hallway, kiddo.  Stay in the lines.
• There is some confusion about which way is up on Becky’s poster, but she does get all the letters pointed the right direction.  Becky caught the instruction about writing your name and the date at the bottom, but “very small” didn’t stick.  Not a big problem.
• As of dinnertime, Becky just needed to outline the bat wings and give her bat a face (it’s a smiley little thing).  We’ll finish it later in the week.

So… really eventful afternoon today.  I have some developing opinions about this project, but I think those will hold until tomorrow.  For now, my kids are satisfied with their work (which they did THEMSELVES) and nobody asked me to print images from the internet, AND we found out that Becky can draw animals and happy faces upside-down.