Mommy Mondays: The Project Problem

Thatkid is halfway through kindergarten now and so far he is loving it.

He's really excelling too, with his reading skills growing by leaps and bounds. The nice thing about his class is that the only homework they've had is for us to read to them, 20 minutes a night.

Except..... there have been two occasions when they gave optional extra work.

The first, was the school read-a-thon, where they raised money for the school by reading as much as they could.  This brought out a really competitive side of Thatkid who wanted to read more minutes than the other kids in his class.  This also made bedtime a lot longer for us, as that 20 minutes of reading turned into 40.

And then, over winter break,  Thatkid decided to take part in another school wide commotion - the biography bottle.

It was an optional assignment to keep the kids busy over break, with a winner chosen from each grade.  Thatkid, who had opted out of the Thanksgiving break assignment, wanted to take part in this one.

And this is when I started working on the fine line between "doing" and "helping."  It's a balance that many parents fail at. Not for any nefarious reason,  but because its 1) hard to watch your kids doing something wrong,  2) it's hard to watch your kids doing something incredibly slowly,  3) sometimes the project is fun.

I will admit to steering Thatkid toward his subject.  He's developed an interest in magic over the past year and received a biography of Harry Houdini for Chanukah.  So I suggested we read that book together for his project.  For a little over a week,  Thatboy and I took turns reading chapters to him,  and luckily,  it definitely piqued his interest.

I had some ideas for how to do the project,  but I forced myself to step back.  I had him draw what he wanted the bottle to look like  (and he picked... the cover of the book.) Then I had him decide what mediums he was going to use to get it to look like his drawing.

We did have a little argument when he kept asking me to make the paint for skin color darker and darker and didn't believe me when I explained that people from Eastern Europe had the same skin as he and I, since our family is from Eastern Europe.

I also manned the glue gun and came up with/ implemented a solution when the lock kept falling off.

I also steered him away from using things like "everyone loved him" as a fascinating fact about Houdini.  And we got into another little argument when I wouldn't do the writing for him.

But overall,  I think we both did really well - him in completing his project and me in letting him complete his project! Let's hope this continues over the next 12 years!