Since Josh has been gone we’ve been partying like rock stars so my blogging has taken a hit. It’s actually much less “party” and much more “me driving many little people to their many activities,” but the end result is the same. Juggling the schedule of 5 humans fries my brain.
Meanwhile, Calvin has been working on his project for the science fair today. In typical form he was trying to print things to add to his board 5 minutes before the bus arrived. He does not get that from me. Or Josh. I have my suspicions, but I’ll wait and see how he turns out before praising or placing blame.
Calvin’s science project was about the flammability of fabric. He took fabrics of different fibers, burned them and timed them to see which fabrics burned the fastest. He was required to put together a display board and present his topic for an hour to parents, teachers and students who stopped by his booth.
Ready to lecture!
His artistic ability and his handwriting he unfortunately did get from me. Aside from the burning in the backyard, the details of the project were a surprise to me. If he had asked for my advice I would have told him to pretty it up a bit and not handwrite the question. Or at least use a ruler to make his lines straight. I do like his title and handmade flame saying “Burn ’em up.” Very clever.
If you look at the photos on his board, he actually used the same picture twice. The first time it printed too dark so I re-did it for him. He originally had many photos from his fabric burning session (I was the photographer), but somehow they all got lost when he transferred them to the school computer . . . or something like that. All I know is last night at 9pm he wanted to find “spare clothes” to burn so he could take more photos and it was then that I found out that he didn’t have any pictures for his board. Luckily I had a picture I had taken with my cell phone. I guess it was so great he decided to use it twice!
The graph he was printing out this morning. I know you’re dying of suspense so I’ll tell you now: denim burns the slowest and polyester the fastest.
Since as recently as Saturday Calvin had nothing to show for his work, Josh and I were a little worried about how his project would turn out. I was pleasantly surprised at how he put it all together.
After I left the school, I texted Josh to tell him that our son did not have a future in graphic design, but he will make a great teacher/public speaker someday. The kid is a natural talker. He knew his topic well, could answer questions about it and sounded informed, but not overly rehearsed.
Explaining to one of the teachers his scientific process. One of the points of this science fair was to select a topic with real world application. Flammability of fabrics has an obvious value because according to Calvin, “if someone were on fire, then they would know how long it will take to burn.”
Since Josh couldn’t be there I took a few photos of the other science projects. Since this is our oldest child and our first school experience, of course we’re going to compare!
Total girl project. Look how beautiful it is. All the text is matted, many different photographs, decorative embellishments, a ruler was clearly used . . . oh, and they gave out homemade gummy bear samples. Trying to buy the judges’ votes, I’m sure.
Another girl project. This girl is a higher level thinker. She was figuring out if the earth wasn’t a sphere, which other shape would provide the optimum environment for humans? Unless you can package that information in a vehicle like LOST, there is no way I can follow you. You are much smarter than I am. My brain hurts — moving on.
Ah, another boy project. I loved this one because not only did their board make me feel better about my own child’s artistic shortcomings, their idea of using facial expressions and creating a lie detector test by reading eye movements and micro-expressions was funny and really interesting. Their results: Girls use many more facial movements and eye movements than boys so even though the sexes lie in equal numbers, boys make better liars.
By this time I was just looking at the display boards to see if my child stood out as being deficient (the gummy bear girls scared me!). I’d say his board looked pretty average, especially compared to the other boys. Fabulous.
The true test? There’s this mythical kid from Korea who gets 100% in everything (I say mythical because I’ve never met him, but hear about him almost every day — the kid from Korea got a perfect score on the standardized assessment, the kid from Korea was really upset that he missed one question on the social studies exam, the kid from Korea got $50,000 from his parents because they had to cancel their vacation . . .). Originally this kid was supposed to be Calvin’s partner, which Josh and I were super excited about because hey, it’s always good to partner with a high achiever, but they parted ways over a disagreement about lasers and whether they could actually build one in the time required (Calvin said they couldn’t).
No lasers or robots this time. Maybe I’ll get to meet this superhero of academia someday, but based on this display board, he looks like a typical 7th grade boy.