"mom, i have a project due". to me, those are the 6 most dreaded words that can come out of my girls mouths. lol! seriously, i just dread school projects with every ounce of my being. i consider myself a pretty crafty person. i know stuff, about a lot of crafts. but school projects? they're a whole other set of "crafts". usually involving a shoebox or a posterboard, and a whole lot of creativity. the kind that i'm not good at. i started to realize just how many of these school projects we have done over the last 12 months. let's check them out, shall we?
a diorama project for sarah on a wild animal. the leopard, to be exact. we had a shoebox, but i thought it was too big. so i went to target, and picked out a shoebox from some toddler shoes and asked if i could take it home for a project. smaller box, less space to fill. smart thinking, right? we actually bought a little kit to help with this. we would spray glue on areas we wanted, and then sprinkle on the grass and stuff. i took a few rocks from the backyard, and stuck those in. the deer was a last minute addition that sarah added, taken from the dollhouse box.
alyssa's science fair project. pretend there's a photo here. i didn't get any photos of it. but it was an experiment about watering plants with different kinds of water. and there was a posterboard involved. it never came home though.
castle structure project for alyssa. this was for her country report, i think. she had 2 other classmates to work with on this. building a structure? i didn't even know where to start. one of her friends bought all the styrofoam, and they convinced another mom to cut some of the pieces. i have a massive disgust for styrofoam, i can't even stand the touch of it. sadly, i was sort of left to still do a lot of the cutting. the girls painted all the pieces. and then figuring out how to glue this all together. i even went to my facebook friends, to figure out what to use to hold it all together. toothpicks came in really handy. we had a lot of this done. but then alyssa went to bed, and i felt the need to spiffy it up a bit. so i started cutting the notched top pieces, painting them, and glueing them all on. this was at midnight, the night before it was due. then i used some leftover spray on grass and foliage from sarah's diorama.
mission poster board project for sarah. i'm actually thankful for this project. since most 4th graders have to actually build a mission. lol! i remember saying something about this to an online friend, and they didn't know what it was about. guess it's a california thing. one of the standard 4th grade projects is to do a mission report, including constructing a mission. which we did with alyssa. somehow, sarah got out of it and only had to make a tri-fold posterboard. notice the smaller sized posterboard? genious idea, thought of by me. are you picking up on my thinking here. smaller shoebox, smaller space to fill. smaller tri-fold posterboard, smaller area to cover.
country map project for alyssa. i think this was acually part of the country report, along with the castle. they had to make a big country map. apparently, AAA doesn't carry maps of other countries. so we printed one off the internet. and then i free hand drew this larger version of it. i would look at the map on my 8.5×11 paper, and then i'd freehand it on my huge posterboard. slowly, but surely. i was actually quite impressed with how good it turned out. so were the girls. then alyssa and her classmates printed the photos, and typed the text.
alyssa's newspaper project. once again, pretend there's a photo here. i didn't get any photos of it. but it was a huge newspaper project. they had to find over 40 different parts of the newspaper and cut them out and glue them to different papers. like a headline, a photo with credit, a birth announcement, a photo advertisment. and on and on. we had cut up newspaper all over this house for a few weeks. i could not wait to toss it all in the recylcing bin. then she had to write a ton of paragraphs about different things. it was huge. it has yet to come home though.
revolutionary war diorama project for sarah. another diorama. i tried to get a little more creative with this. even though it's still not great. lol! i took out leftover styrofoam, and painted it and made a door. even stuck a brad in there, for the doorhandle. the story of this girl, was that she was a secret spy. the soldiers held their meetings at her house, and they would force her to go and hide with her family. but this time, she listened in and overheard the plans. and then she went and reported it and put a stop to something huge. so this is her (she's actually a christmas caroler that was from sarah's friend's project), listening at the door. apparently, she had a really HUGE door. lol!
sarah's poster board for the revolutionary war report. this was in addition to the diorama. two projects at once? are you kidding me? it was supposed to be a newspaper, in the form of a posterboard. sarah did all the drawings and wording. with a LOT of direction from me. lol! i do think my newspaper title looks really cool. i asked her what she would say when her teacher asked her where she got the cool letters. and sarah went into the "my mom uses the slice, by making memories". it was pretty funny. lol!
alyssa's science fair project, again. this was done with 2 classmates again, and they did their experiment on the diet coke and mentos thing. experiment done at a friends house, since we all know i can't stand a mess of any kind. and diet coke and mentos exploding all over kind of sounded like a mess. posterboard done here. which the girls did just about the entire thing. even drawing the coke bottle, which turned out great. it ended up taking 2nd place in the junior high science fair.
a suitcase for sarah's state report. the latest project, just turned in last week. the project part of sarah's state report. there was a whole 2 page typed report also, along with drawings on all the state symbols. inside this suitcase, they were to "pack" places you would go and what you would do if you visited your state. which was florida, if you didn't catch that. sarah wanted to make the suitcase from cardboard, so i tore up a box and made it look all worn by tearing off some of the layers. inside, i glued down some travel pattern paper. and then we printed photos of 5 places to go, and sarah wrote the descriptions for each place. we had some creative differences on the outside of the suitcase. which was actually really funny, looking back. and i added the ribbon handle that night after she'd gone to bed. and in the morning she told me that she was going to use brown ribbon. guess she didn't like my striped stuff. lol!
and since we know that most of these projects are hugely done by the parents, i thought this series of comic strips was pretty funny. my mom had cut these out and saved them for me, back when we were doing the revolutionary war diorama, back in december. click on them to see them a bit bigger.
so there you go. 12 months of school projects. yes, that was all in the last 12 months. we have more coming. boohoo for us. but i have to say, there is nothing better than having one of those projects walk back through your door and finding out we got an "A+" on it. yay us! i think the animal diorama got a "B", but all the others have gotten "A+'s" on them. then there's the issue of what to do with all these projects 😉
Laura Vegas 
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