That BIG School Project: A Parental Survival Story

The fear of every parent... the big school project.  We all know it.  The one that gets put off until the night before, and then it's a mad frustrating rush to complete.  We just survived one of those in my house, but not without a ton of hiccups, including a devastating set back with 2 days to due date.

About 4 weeks ago, my 5th grade daughter was tasked with a "Create A Country" assignment where she was do plot a map, and write a paper showing understanding of "the 5 Themes of Geography."  Huh?  I don't remember that lesson.  However, when you google it, clearly it's a big deal.  There's even quite a few memorization songs for it.  Cool enough.  The problem was, she wasn't bringing home very much in terms of directions.  So, we just went at it, imaginations running wild as she created "Fairytopia", with a bunch of really cool ideas. Then the map came and the ideas started getting more and more elaborate, including the need to have the island be very small on the global scale.  That meant a little more planning in terms of latitude and longitude.  I learned things I didn't know.  But before you judge, I didn't do it myself.  I made sure she thoroughly understood what she needed to know (the basics of lat. and long.) before we moved on.  I wrote down the coordinates and the scale, and they were put in a folder.  I spent a lot of time researching that.

So here comes the weekend.  It's go time!  We're pretty far along (other than the 5 paragraphs of writing), and I ask for that paper.  The response... "Well...".  I quickly learn the folder with the paper and the basic instructions we had seen was accidentally left at school Friday.  WHAT!?!?!  In other words, back to point zero. But the second blow was still to come.

We quickly reached out to another parent to see if we can get a copy of the directions to at least get reorganized.  What we were greeted with was a very detailed sheet, listing specific needs she was being graded on as well as everything well explained.  Problem is, we had never seen this sheet before. It obviously would have been a HUGE help. My daughter admitted she had her own sheet, but it was of course in that folder.  She claimed she didn't know she was "allowed" to bring it home.  It took a while to calm me down.

We eventually got back on track, and by midnight last night, all was FINALLY done.  Not a great bedtime, especially on a Sunday, but it was what it was, and hopefully a lesson learned by my daughter. Hopefully. Parent pride kicked in this morning as she very excitedly walked out the door with the project. Sure, I'm betting we made quite a few missteps (as to be expected not having all the directions), but it looked great, she was very pleased with the result, and so were we.  Of course, we'll probably have a tired, grouchy girl tonight, but all is good. It's sure nice to have that stress out of the house though.