Our family is new to the whole school thing and we’re still having to make plenty of adjustments. It seems as though every day she comes home with a new activity going on at the school or fundraiser that we need to take part in. It’s a little overwhelming. Already we’ve had to pick and choose what we want to be involved in or financially support, because we can’t do it all!
Hallie came home last week with a flyer for the upcoming bike rodeo (an eagle scout project teaching bike safety. They were asking the students to create posters and return them the following Monday. Hallie is overly zealous and loves school and she was not about to skip this project. I tried talking her out of it, but she insisted she HAD to do this for school. We forgot about for a couple days and we finally came across the flyer on Saturday afternoon and in a panic, Hallie insisted she start. So we brainstormed. I threw out what I felt were some really good ideas and she didn’t bite on any of them. (A poster cut out to look like a bike and make the wheels so they can rotate, how cool is that!!) So we had a small lesson on “googling” and Hallie sat at the computer and looked through pictures and pictures of bikes.
After plenty of searching she was ready. She wanted to create a bike. So I threw out yet another idea and she finally thought it was good enough: create a bike tire out of toothpicks. She carefully cut out cardstock and glued on toothpicks I cut out for her. Due to the amount of glue she used, these took nearly 24 hours to dry!! We resumed the poster on Sunday afternoon.
I traced some letters for her and she cut out the letters BIKE. We then were disrupted again and came back to the project just an hour before bedtime. By this point, the project had dragged on long enough in my opinion and I’m ready to be done. We had lost the flyer at this point and were unsure as to what information actually needed to be on the poster. So I recalled just a few details I could remember. (I later found the flyer and we missed a whole lot of information!!)
She started writing. Messed up. Got frustrated. Started over. She is a slight perfectionist! I decided, it would be in the best interest of time to create four separate pieces of paper for the words, that way when she messed up on the 3rd line, the first 2 were still usable! This still took a lot of time. She carefully started gluing the bike together. After I cut out a seat and handlebars, she successfully made a weaved basket for the front of the bike! We laid out the rest to make sure she liked the location. She started moving stuff around, rearranging. She really stewed over this process and she decided she wanted another piece of paper behind the word bike to make it stand out. (She is a girl after my own heart!) I offered a couple other suggestions which she kindly refused and she started to glue the rest down. It was done and she was in love with it and I thought it was pretty cute as well. It has an Americana theme because the only piece of cardstock we had was some left over 4th of July decorations that was double sided, but it worked! 
She turned it in the next morning and was the only one who turned one in for her class. Which reinforced my point earlier that week that this was a volunteer project not homework, although she disagreed. In her mind, anything the teacher even remotely suggests is homework in her mind. 
We showed up to the bike rodeo yesterday morning and I noticed her poster hanging on the wall. We walk over to it and with stars in her eyes, she reads the paper that says her poster won first place. She turns to me confused, “What is first place?” I love her “oldest child in the family” innocence, she had no clue. She walked away with a snazzy prize package – including a new helmet (which is fantastic because hers is still in storage, and probably won’t fit her by the time we get it out!) and she was pleased as punch with the bag of smarties. I’m sure this is the first of many many school projects my overly enthusiastic daughter will participate in. Lets just hope she learns how to work a little bit faster!!
