Pearl Harbor and About Owls

The kids' TAG projects were due this week.  This was a six-month project with lots of milestones along the way.  I'm sure the kids learned some new content from the project, but I think the biggest lessons were in time management and long term planning.  I worked closely with Rudy throughout his project, reading the books with him and helping him take notes.  We even sat down together to work on his rough draft.  In the end, his project went pretty smoothly (except for the as-expected full scale Rudy-meltdowns when he didn't want to work on something).  

On the other hand, I let Brady work more independently on his project at the beginning.  He didn't seem to want help and worked independently on his note-taking.  He finished and turned in his rough draft and didn't want me to look at it.  It all came crashing down, though, when he had to revise his rough draft.  Thankfully, he's a competent enough writer that he avoided some common problems (e.g., in this paper, I am going to write about...).  However, he was significantly lacking in content for each of his body paragraphs.  We spent a long afternoon together finding more research to fill in the holes.  It was a valuable lesson (one of many for him this year) in doing things well the first time around.  

Side note...James and I have had this talk with Brady multiple times this year.  One night at dinner, I told Brady that my parents used to tell me, "Do it right the first time so you don't have to do it again."  James spoke up and said that his parents used to say, "If you don't have time to do it right now, when will you have time to do it again?"  Funny how we become our parents...

For his final presentation, Brady put together a diorama of the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor.  He used some old coffee table books to create the backdrop, painted foam board to build the harbor, and constructed the mountain out of clay.  He even used cotton balls and pipe cleaners to create the explosions on the boats.

Rudy started the year wanting to research animals.  All of them.  From there, he narrowed it down to nocturnal animals and then, thankfully, down to owls.  Rudy chose to do a tri-fold poster.  He wanted to "glue some sticks on with some owls sitting on them."  We asked Bella if we could borrow some of her owls and got a bonus when she let Rudy borrow her dissected owl pellet to display too!