Out like a lion

We have our second first-grade project. I use the word "we" advisedly, since five minutes ago his father was busy with protractor and ruler, lamenting our lack of compass, happily working out distances and angles to form a small pyramid out of cereal-box cardboard (I did suggest that one could probably just find a template on the internet, but he was clearly having fun) while the first-grader was upstairs helping his little sister throw raisins around her room.

"She wanted to sleep on beans," Dash said by way of explanation.

He has to make an animal out of 3-D shapes, the better to exhibit his understanding of angles, vertices, and sides, and also his knowledge of our natural world. He was quite gung-ho when he came home with the instructions, and has been busily stockpiling items from the recycling ever since, but showed some reluctance to actually get down to working out which shapes would go together, and how, to form whatever animal he wanted to make, which he said was a lion.

"I'm waiting for another toilet roll," he said every time I asked him how the lion was going to manifest.

When we finally had five empty toilet rolls - one for a very fat tail as well as four legs - he did a slapdash job of sticking things together with a lot of tape. His sister took the tape and started an animal hospital, putting plaster casts on the legs of all her teddies. We haven't much tape left any more.

Then I noted that he needs to use at least three different shapes and his lion was made of one cylindrical ice-cream tub, two cylindrical bottle caps (eyes) and five cylindrical toilet rolls. He added a square tissue-box head. Thus it stayed for two days, until I wondered out loud a few dozen times how it was ever going to look more like a lion and what the third 3-D shape would be.

Writing the accompanying text

The paint came out today. I hate painting with the children more than I hate baking with them. This is why I send them to school, so they can make this mess on someone else's time (and table, and floor). We did it outside on the deck and it still made an unholy mess and left me twitching in the corner. He disassembled the lion (so much for all that tape) and tried to paint it, but the writing on the boxes showed through, so instead we painted some sheets of paper yellow to cover the boxes with.

We were still one shape short, though, which is when I came up with the pyramid idea and his father put it into action. I'm not sure if it's going to be a nose or a tail-end; maybe the student himself will have some input at this point.

But I feel I'm falling short of my lofty plans to have no input at all in Dash's school projects. If we're getting this involved at this point, what will be expected of us by the time he's doing science-fair baking-soda volcanoes, or decoding genomes, or whatever the kids are expected to accomplish these days? It's the sort of thing that makes me wish we could all just unschool, let the kids follow their interests, let them earn a crust doing something that makes them happy, make them self-motivated and entrepreneurial. I don't know exactly how you grow an entrepreneur, but I'm pretty sure it's not by bugging them to paint sheets of paper yellow and making pyramids for them.

So now I'm just going to sit here in the other room until I stop twitching, while his father helps him put the lion together.

Note the mismatched-on-purpose eyes. I think it's the Lalaloopsy influence.