Science Fair

On New Year's Day, we asked the kids to get out their homework. The Christmas break was over and it was time to get ready to go back to school the next morning. Shortly afterward, I found John sobbing, extremely upset and absolutely overwhelmed. He showed me a packet of papers about the science fair project which he received in October. The project was due in seven days and he hadn't started it yet. After I convinced him that yes, he did indeed have to do it, I reassured him that I would help him to get the job done.

That began a 30 hour marathon of working together day and evening for five days straight.The first two days of this week, he discussed his ideas for an experiment with his older brothers and sisters and we all tried to figure out a project that was doable in this time period. Snow had fallen and in fact that is what saved the day. Three successive days of school cancellations occurred, wrapped around a weekend  and we didn't loose power! What a fabulous gift of TIME!

Luckily, we have old encyclopedia sets which John used. He had to write a research summary and there were TWELVE other parts to the written portion of this project in addition to the backboard. Charts and graphs, hypothesis, procedure, variable, constant, dependent, independent, conclusion and bibliography were the words of the day. Luckily, John is great on the computer and I love to manage things and people!

At seven o'clock on the evening before it was due, the project was completely finished. What a feeling of accomplishment! We worked together very well for which I was extremely grateful. I drove him into school the next morning with the big backboard and the bound booklet with all the written work in report form. I was excited to hear about how the teacher liked it all. He said that he turned in the backboard but didn't know where to put the book portion of it so he didn't turn that part in... At that point things got a little loud around here!  What the ??????????  John had to then call the teacher at home to tell her that he had indeed finished the project but didn't know where to put the book portion of it as she had only told them where to put the boards. He learned all about it being HIS responsibility to make sure that he turns in things when they are due even if the teacher doesn't say anything about them.

I am grateful that I was able to scrap all of my weekend plans and that the family could eat sandwiches for five days because this project took everything John and I had.  I give the teacher very little credit for actually teaching seventh graders how to manage and execute a project with this many steps. Breaking this down into small chunks with the teacher checking the work would have made more sense to me as I didn't know a thing about this being assigned or due. Nevertheless, this whole experience was like the best of both worlds between homeschooling vs. going to school. This mother had the opportunity to teach John all the steps from taking notes to final editing which I hope will serve him well the next time he has a complex assignment, like a teacher would. Meanwhile, we had to accomplish such a large task which I might have been reluctant to assign as a homeschooling mother because of the intensity of the workload!