Wednesday, March 29, 2017

I Think That I Shall Never See, A School Project on the Life Cycle of A Tree...

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Last night, I stayed up very late (or early) because Youngest was doing A Project. Those of you who aren't parents may not recognize the unholy terror that rises in the breast when you hear those words. Those who are may be having PTSD-like flashbacks to pouring baking soda into a funnel.

We all remember doing A Project as a kid. The sugar-cube igloo, the papier-mâché volcano, the poster illustrating the life cycle of a butterfly, complete with a real cocoon found on a bush. First off, let's posit this: no Project ever taught you anything you couldn't learn from reading a paragraph in an encyclopedia (1). I learned more about volcanoes from watching Tommy Lee Jones tracking lava flow down La Cienega Boulevard than I ever did from making a clay model of Mount Vesuvius (2). I know about Iroquois family structure because I read a book about it, not because I made a model of a long house.(3) 

Reminiscing about the Projects of your youth, you will see a shadowy figure in the background. Look closer. Is it coming into focus? Yes, it's your mother or father (4). It was, in fact, your mother who tore 500 strips of newspaper and dunked them in runny wheat paste until her fingers turned gray that enabled you to get an A on that dinosaur model. It was your father who found that moth cocoon in the back yard and told you it belonged to a butterfly. It was MY mother who sat up until 2am cutting out pictures of flowers from magazines (5) for a poster whose content and purpose I can't recall. Pistils and stamen, maybe? The parts of which, by the way, I still can't identify. One of my kids asked me one time in the garden and I said, "All that with the pollen is the flower's naughty bits."

Yes, much of the real work of The Project is done by good old Mom or Dad. I'm not talking about helicopter parents who design posters that look as if they should be hanging in the MOMA. Even those of us who believe our kids ought to be the moving force behind The Project still wind up as unheralded laborers. It's like admiring, say, Vita Sackville-West's garden. The creative design is hers, sure, but there still wouldn't be anything to look at without some poor old sod digging in 500 pounds of manure by hand. You, the parent, are the poor old sod in this case (6).

Why is this? Mostly, its due to the Universal Law of School Projects, which states a child will tell its parents about a project no more than 24 hours before it is due (7). The Universal Law also states there will be at least one ingredient to the project that will require a trip to Michael's or Jo-Ann's (8), or, if your child is older, a dash to Staples to replace your color ink cartridges (9). Because your kid will have to do five hours of work between the time he told you about The Project and bedtime - not to mention his other homework for the next day - you inevitably wind up doing the scut work while he does his math sheets.

How has this worked out in my own life as a parent? Well, there was the time Youngest came up with a magnificently creative Project on Oskar Schindler, featuring a life-sized cut out of Schindler with the name of every person he saved from the Holocaust written inside the outline of his body. Schindler was truly worthy of being recognized as Righteous Among Nations, because he saved hundreds and hundreds of people, and The Smithie (bless her heart) and I wrote down every one of their names. By hand. 

Or there was the time The Sailor had to collect ten different leaves for a leaf and seed board (10). Unfortunately, it was autumn, and Ross and I still worked in our office jobs, meaning we and the children got home well after the sun had already set. Guess who spent an hour casing the yard with a flashlight to find suitable specimens? (11) Or, for each of my three kids, the traditional State O' Maine trifold board presentation, featuring lobsters, blueberries, fish, pine trees and chickadees. (12) Or the Smithie's dioramas - I had a entire room in my barn dedicated to saving cardboard boxes for dioramas. They always required small plastic figurines (13), paint (14) and some three-dimensional sky element like cotton ball clouds or glow in the dark stars (15). Then I had to save them as precious mementos for about a decade until the Smithie forgot about them and I could throw them out.

I admit, I was surprised when Youngest told me she had a Project (16). My exact words were, "For God's sake, you're a junior in high school taking AP classes! Why are you wasting your time making a poster?" It's a very nice one, however, with thirty French sentences about Rwanda neatly written in the colors of the national flag along an outline of the country (17). It was good to know I could step up my Project game when necessary - and all I had to do was help with a couple verbs and give my opinion on the graphic design. This had better be the last one, however (18).

How about you, dear readers? Tell us about the posters, papier-mâché and potting clay of your Projects past and present!

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(1) For younger readers, an encyclopedia was like Wikipedia, but set down on paper. It also served as a decorative accent on your parents' teak Danish modern bookcase.

(2) Also awesome? The 1959 Last Days of Pompeii. History AND vulcanology in one! You really can't beat Steve Reeves in a skimpy toga.

(3) It was a bitchin' model, though. I used real bark and moss and had a little plastic deer standing right outside. Which, when I think about it, was not a safe place for the deer. Oh, well.

(4) If the Shadowy Figure is not your mother or father, you may be a character in a dark psychological thriller.

(5) In the olden days, children, we had no printers at home, and our parents had to stockpile magazines as a sort of graphic image library. You were allowed to cut up any magazine except National Geographic, which was a Serious Reference that you kept on the bookcase, cf. note (1) 

(6) And in so many others.

(7) In many cases, the notification of The Project happens at 8pm, right after you ask your child if his homework is all done. "Oh," he will say. "I forgot. I have to make a poster labeling all the parts of a starfish. Can you get me some colored pencils and a poster board?"

(8) It doesn't matter how much craft material you have stored in a closet. If you have crepe paper, your child will need ribbons. If you have buttons, she will need tiny mirrors. If you have little plastic animals, she will need little felt animals.

(9) Because he needs 20 color pictures representing the cultural life of Senegal. Which you will wind up finding, downloading, cropping, printing and trimming. I think the magazine thing was easier.

(10) Trip to Michael's for rigid foam board.

(11) Me.

(12) I wanted to include double-wides and meth teeth, but Ross wouldn't let me.

(13) Michael's

(14) Michael's

(15) CVS or Michael's depending on if it was a daytime or nighttime scene.

(16) When I dropped her off at the high school yesterday, The Project was due today.

(17) Poster board and markers from Wal-Mart. I was in the area.

(18) Because at the start of the school year I threw out all the other materials I had been saving. She's a junior! Taking AP classes!

47 comments:

  1. Although the girls were not good with Rule Number Seven, I am chuckling at the memories as I shake my head in agreement, Julia.
    Thankfully, we always had a bit more than twenty-four hours since the project-of-the-year always turned out to be something for the science fair. Most vivid recollection? The year the youngest daughter decided that, if her dad would help just a bit, she could make a wind tunnel and demonstrate how air moves over and under a wing.
    At the same time, the older daughter stationed herself on the garage roof and began dropping eggs. Coddled in protective gear and gently tucked into its space capsule, each one headed for the ground so that she could determine which materials provided the best protection for her eggstronaut . . . .

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    1. As the mother of three science geeks, I had repressed this memory, Joan. Must be a required project in Physics!

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  2. So funny, Julia. May I just say I haven't heard someone use "bitchin" as a superlative in decades - I loved it. And my house was just the same - you could NOT cut up National Geographic, which of course had the best pictures - unless for some reason we had a duplicate. And I think we had four different encyclopedias on the bookshelves.

    One son had a Project for 100 day - the 100th day of school. He and his father decided to make a map of the world and find stamps from 100 countries from said father's stamp collection. It turned into a family project. Another, in 6th grades, one of his least-motivated years, had to do something involving ponds and larvae (ick). But it was a cold spring and nothing was hatching. I think I ended up cheating and ordered a praying mantis larva online...

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    1. Oh, Edith, I forgot the 100 Days of Kindergarten project! We sent our kids in with 100 books (in easy-to-tote milk crates.) Books being the only items we have in significant numbers.

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  3. Whoever came up with the concept of school projects should be killed. One of my sons' involved a snake skin. Beyond that, I have blocked out all memories.

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    1. I suspect school projects are teachers' revenge on parents. "You want us to spend all day with your little darlings? Fine. But you have to make a workable water tray to display wave mechanics."

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  4. Oh Julia, another fabulous entry for your Erma Bombeck style book of essays!

    The project I did in fifth grade sticks in my mind--a model of an entire house wired for electric lights. Somehow when you connected the wires, the little bulbs lit up in all the rooms!

    For Andrew, one project was to have a group of second graders over to make baklava. The results were delicious if you ignored the brush bristles in every other bite. I still use the recipe!

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  5. Is it possible my kids didn't do school projects? If they did, my daughters' are buried in a haze. What I remember is the dreaded FIVE PARAGRAPH ESSAY.
    -- Say it.
    -- Say it again three times.
    -- In conclusion, say it one last time.
    Talk about taking the joy out of writing not to mention the logic out of building an argument. The whole idea should be burned.
    I'd have welcomed ponds and larvae, leaves and seed pods.

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    1. Omigod, now I'm having flashbacks, Hallie! LOL My youngest daughter did not inherit the family writing gene, and this describes every single essay we ever had to critique for her, up until college.

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    2. Hallie, this is the best description of Baconian essays I've ever seen. Next time Youngest is struggling with one in her comp class, I'll point her to this comment.

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    3. I recently had to judge essays by six graders, for a contest sponsored by a big bookstore, with the topic "my favorite teacher. " every single one of them was written exactly that way. Exactly that way!! My brain started screaming after about 10 of them… Different stories, but with exactly the same rhythm.

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  6. My son went to a Montessori school where each year one of the big event was the Interest Fair -- like a science fair, only not limited to scientific topics. It was required of all students, involved a paper, preparing a booth with a tri-fold board, and an oral interview by outside judges. We have many tales of woe from said interest fair, but my personal favorite was his final one. His topic was Manga, the Japanese graphic novel genre that doesn't have a perfect parallel in US culture. In his paper, he (accurately) described the several sub-genres, which includes one that is adult-themed and in his 8th-grade words, "borders on pornography." For some reason the teacher reading the paper became concerned that his tri-fold board was going to have pornography on it. We got a frantic call telling us we had to bring his project to the principal's office to be reviewed before we could take it in to the fair and set up. As another of his teachers pointed out, this was our 11th year at this school (2 years of pre-K plus K thru 8), so as a family we were a known quantity. There was no reason in the world for anyone to fear that we were going to allow our son to bring porn to the interest fair. But the alarm was sounded and there was lots of gnashing of teeth before everyone agreed the exhibit was fine. Still kind of gets my blood pressure up just thinking about it!

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  7. Oh Ramona, Ramona--killing would be too easy for the person who came up with the idea of school projects! I say we make them do project after project ad infinitum--they get the details at say 9 p.m. and the project is due at 8 a.m. the next morning. And they have to carry it on the school bus and get it to school in one piece. Like the scale model of the La Madeleine in Paris, for a French class. To scale, mind you, from photographs.

    And Hallie, I remember prodding, prodding after many screams of despair (from child), 'JUST WRITE A SENTENCE. WRITE A SENTENCE. That's how you start.' And I always think, graduation hats should be worn by parents, so that on that most happy day, WE can fling them into the air!

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  8. Julia, your footnoted posts are such a treat. Never mind how this one is giving me flashbacks to the some of the 35 years of child rearing in my past.

    I babysat my sixth-grade grandson last month while his parents went away for four days, over which time he was supposed to be working on a major project, sort of a junior term paper. Neither of us was equal to the task, I'm afraid, and not much progress was made. So my daughter had to live the scenario above. Heheheheh.

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  9. I forgot to add the dreaded Food Project, usually for the Festival of Many Nations. One of my kids got Portugal. Do you know what Portuguese food is famous for? Fish stew and salt cod. Try selling THAT to a classroom full of first graders.

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    1. I remember those food projects!! (Excuse me while I suppress a shudder.) BEST year was when he got assigned Tanzania and I was working with a Tanzanian engineer! My colleague gave us a nice, easy corn-based side dish recipe that we could actually make and the classmates would actually eat.

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    2. Portugal is also known for Madiera wine. The teacher might appreciate some of that.

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    3. The boys' school actually had the best possible food project-- the Thanksgiving Feast. Since the Pilgrims and Native Americans brought what they had to offer--anything was fair game at the school feast--just like a potluck. And I always brought the local IGA's fried chicken. No fuss, no muss, no leftovers! And happy kids! (I think the teachers were behind that one--enough already of dishes that no kid would touch with a ten-foot pole, let alone the teachers trying to take a bite, smile, and look convincingly at the kids "Mmmm, really tasty! Go on, try a bite!"

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    4. I've been waiting for the food part of Heritage Day. My boy has Sweden, and I swear we are serving Swedish fish. Or the little meatballs from Ikea.

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  10. Nope, I guess we do have different school curriculums from the US here in Ontario (Canada). I don't ever remember doing any school projects as those mentioned above, so my parents were spared the trauma (and last minute drama). The closest thing we had to do in junior high school (grades 7-9) was the science fair that Susan mentioned where each student prepared a booth with a tri-fold board outlining their experiment. Again, my parents were never involved in helping to create these boards...not even buying the necessary supplies. I was expected to pay for it out of my allowance (or part-time job money). I guess they got off lightly!

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  11. I think my mother got off easy on the project front. Even as a kid I liked making stuff, so I'd dig in on dioramas and do them myself. Salt and flour volcanoes were fun, and I wasn't particularly into the science fair scene--mostly because I never could figure out what the brine shrimp were supposed to do and/or prove. As I got older, I also sewed all my own costumes and, in high school, all the costumes of the other kids in the musical, too. (That one not only got the show onstage, but earned me an A as a design project in advanced art.) It helped that my mom was an art teacher, so we had all the construction paper, glue, poster board, and paint any kid could ask for, although glitter was forbidden for reasons that are obvious to me now. As an adult, I either dodged that bullet entirely by not having children, or took it on as a career by organizing and staging concerts. Either way, the dreaded Project is no big deal around here.

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    1. You artistic/crafty types make it harder for the rest of us.Yours is the ideal against which all others are judged! I always thought there should be an option--let the artistic types do a project and let the verbal types (me!) write a paper.

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    2. Actually, my older sister was the artist in the family, so I completely understand what it's like to be held to that unreachable standard. Why do you think I went in to theatre? Less competition within the family.

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  12. The Girl had a history teacher in 6thngrade who gave us approximately negative four days to design and make "historically accurate" Spartan armor (yes, he wanted historically accurate armor for warrior that were wiped out before they got around to making the YouTube video on just how to accomplish this task) with an "instructions" sheet that looked like it was plotted out by a 14-year-old dementia-laden squirrel and typed up by a toddler with the flu.

    ALSO! ALSO! The MFer didn't even grade them. He changed his mind when he saw how many kids had their "historically accurate" Spartan arm made from scratch by the handy Chinese factory workers who supply Party City.

    To state that this man was the physical model for the first person I killed off in the manuscript I started a year later would be "historically accurate."

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    1. Aimee, you have entered 'project hell' when your child (and you) can't even understand the directions and then, yes, the b-----d doesn't even bother to grade the assignment!

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    2. Aimee, you always make the worst situations so damned funny!

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    3. Oh, Karen, you laugh or you cry. Or you go to jail for maiming someone.

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    4. Amen to that, Aimee. Was he a young teacher? I find the younger they are, the more exciting "throw your own authentic Cretan pottery at home" sounds.

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    5. Didn't the Spartans fight naked?

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  13. First, Julia is definitely the next Erma Bombeck.

    "I don't always know when my kid has a school project. But when I do, you can bet your a$$ it's tomorrow."

    I dreaded projects in elementary/middle school. Dreaded. Them. Because there was always some THING that required a search of the tri-state area to find. At least The Girl (mostly) handled her own work once she reached, oh, fifth grade. I still have PTSD about the "famous person" project she had - EVERY MONTH mind you - in third grade. Wikipedia was not an acceptable source. Would you believe the local library did not have an encyclopedia? Then there was the art project in 8th grade. Now The Girl is a very good artist. She did her own poster. The poster than "won" belonged to a boy in her class, with no artistic talent, whose mother had completed it. That should have disqualified him (in my opinion), but he was a teacher favorite. Grr.

    The Boy? The worst was 8th grade. He had to write a biography, 3-5 paragraphs about every year in his life STARTING AT CONCEPTION AND INCLUDING BIRTH. With PICTURES! Okaayy, he remembered NOTING about life until about age six. So guess who did the first years? Three guesses and the first two don't count. The teacher, acknowledging this point when I brought it up, said it was "a great way for parents and children to bond." I'm sorry, but who wants to reminisce about barfing ten times a day for five months and two trips to the ER for dehydration? Not this mom. But I did.

    Now they are in high school, I haven't heard anything. The Girl does her own projects (she did ask me to print something at work because she wanted it to be in color and double-sided). The Boy has not had a major project - yet. We shall see.

    Mary/Liz

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  14. I can't recall much difficulty in school projects but I do remember one. My eldest, maybe then in the second grade, had to write and illustrate a book. And his brief was to describe all the things he did in a day. It was cute and fun, and I admired it and sent him off to school. That afternoon he brought it home with a note from his teacher asking for an edit. Unbeknownst to me, he had included going to the bathroom and drew a picture of himself standing and urinating, little bitty peepee and all.

    I refused the edit.

    Ann in Rochester

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    1. Editorial integrity, at its finest!

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    2. Flash forward to junior high. Same kid wrote an essay on the Battle of the Bulge, footnoted et al. The teacher accused him of plagiarism because it was so good, no help from parents either. That was an interesting parent-teacher conference, especially when I suggested she go to the library and find ONE instance of copying from a published work. I'm not sure she'd ever been to the library.

      Now he writes his own books. He could do with an editor, but nothing is plagiarized.

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  15. I was home schooled 4th through 10th, so I was able to skip most of those projects. My mom agreed with you that building something like that doesn't help you learn, which is good since I'm not that artistic.

    However, I had some projects like you are talking about - for English class in eleventh grade. And yes, Mom and Dad did have to help, although I did most of the work myself.

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  16. I had to make a leaf book, of course. And yes, the 24 hour rule. I got the leaves, and put them on pieces of paper, but that I needed a cool cover for the notebook.
    Where was I going to get fabric for this? Ah ha! How about my mother's bright green felt holiday tablecloth!
    I Cut a huge rectangle out of it and used it to cover my notebook. I think I stapled it on.
    The level of anger from my mother was never before seen, or after, in our house.
    Imagine this in all caps: you cut up my tablecloth? Why on earth would you do that?
    I can still hear her voice!

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  17. I am crying laughing. Your footnotes are fabulous. The hooligans have at least 6 years of projects combined ahead of them...and now I'm crying. Phrases often heard during project time in our house include: "Trifold? Where am I supposed to get a trifold at midnight?" "Mom! Start the car! The knife slipped and we have a gusher!!!" "Um...are homemade crystals made of Borax, a wing, and a prayer supposed to have a heartbeat and move?"

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  18. As one of four kids, there were projects galore in my house growing up. I remember doing reports on Maryland, armadillos, and a timeline of the history of the world, which didn't take any time at all! The most popular project story in my family is that one of my sisters wasn't happy with her report cover so she decided to trim it. And trim it. And trim it. The report cover ended up being the width of a ruler, with a full-sized report behind it! Not a great moment in terms of presentation.

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    1. Yes, report covers! Always a problem, as I learned, too…

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    2. Oh, Hank. Poor you, and poor your mother.

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  19. Oh, and I once thought it would be easy and impressive and successful for the science fair to make a double helix out of wire and different colored ping-pong balls. It seemed like it should stand up on its own, but it didn't. I made more like a multicolored collapsed ladder. … disaster

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  20. Classic!
    These announcements are like the permission slip that is lost (and forgotten) in the bottom of the book bag.
    Libby Dodd

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  21. School projects are a way to explore your most corrosive family dynamics. My daughter (competitive, perfectionist, controlling) would always have a brilliant vision for her project that she didn't quite have the skills to execute. Then her father (competitive, perfectionist, controlling) would get involved to "help." Cue the fireworks. Meanwhile, our son, born with a keen sense of the world's absurdity, never gave a flying #$*% about these projects. Plus, he is severely artistically challenged. He can't even cut pictures out of a magazine, which I think stems from being kinda left-handed (writes lefty, does other things righty). But he's not ambidextrous; more like ambi-clumsy. So I always felt compelled to get involved. If I let him hand in his own work, I was sure the teacher would think he lived in a youth shelter or an abusive foster home. My ego on the line, not his.

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  22. Please. No. To this day gingko trees give me flashbacks to Leaf book project. Hordes of desperate parents scouring the town for specific leaves. Stripping the trees like locusts. Helping our son put his book together with typewritten explanations the night before it's due. Same son going to bed while his insane mother is typing and pasting. Oh god. That reminds me of another project where insane mom sat up until two in the morning transforming an old cub scout uniform shirt into General Custer's for an oral book report. Please, no more.

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  23. This just happened at our house! For extra fun 1) the project was already late when I heard about it and 2) dear hubby was away. The lad had to do some kind of display about Sweden. A famous person was one of the choices. I voted for Alfred Nobel but the library didn't have materials about him on the shelf (they were checked out). The final result was a brochure about the creator of Minecraft.

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  24. Memorable science projects from my life:

    Collect 50 leaves (one oak, one maple, one chestnut) for an A, mounted on plain white paper for an identification quiz.

    Find varieties of pond algae by hacking the ice with an axe and collecting water

    Identify 25 different trees by their twigs. Find and mount 30 different bugs.

    And for my children:

    soak puppy teeth in a variety of beverages and weigh on lab scale (Gatorade was bad)

    heat tennis balls in the oven or cool in freezer and measure and compare the bounce: hot and moist, hot and dry, room temperature, cold and moist, cold and dry

    build a working catapult and hurl a tennis ball (pick one of the above) across the gym into the target trash can

    create an edible cell model. We baked a cake in two stainless bowls and used candy for the various components

    My favorite kitchen project: compare the hot cross buns recipe in Mrs. Beeton's 19th c. book of Household Management (scored from the Cincinnati library) with a modern day version, student essay on the phenomenon, bake enough buns for the entire class.

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