100 Days

Today is the 100th Day of the school year. To celebrate, a weekend project was sent home. The directions were both explicit and generic at the same time. What it boiled down to, was that the child was supposed to affix 100 of "something" to this yellow piece of paper and return it on Monday. Explicitly, the parents were directed to allow this to be the child's project.

So, when this came home on Friday, we started discussing what Henry should do. A little guidance isn't a bad thing, right? I figured it would help him learn how to plan and design a project before he just jumps in and starts gluing things down. We continued the discussions on Saturday, and by the end of the day, we had the rough outline of what he wanted his project to be.

He wanted to have a dinosaur on it, but decided he wasn't that good a drawing dinosaurs. We found a coloring book that had dinosaurs in it. So he picked the one he wanted, picked the colors he wanted to use and set out to color it.

Now, I must admit that I helped him by cutting out the dinosaur once he was done coloring it.

After that, he counted out popcorn piles. He counted out piles of 10, and then counted by 10s to make sure that he had a hundred. (Mommy recounted everything and found a few discrepancies, but I made him recount the piles that were off and fix them on his own.)

Next, he decided where he wanted the various groups of popcorn to be attached to the dinosaur. I applied the glue as I wasn't ready to hand over the glue stick to Henry at the kitchen table. He placed all of the kernels where he wanted them.

After he was done, he remembered that we had some glitter glue and begged to have some glitter glue applied. Again, I wasn't ready to hand over the glitter glue to him at the kitchen table, but he picked the colors and placement, I just did the actual application.

At the bottom, he wrote the label for the piece, and then we accented it with more glitter glue.

In the end, I feel like this was a good representation of what he wanted it to be. I think he was proud of it, but of course he worried how it would stack up against what the other kids did. He also worried about what his teacher would think of it. I reassured him that the important thing for this project was that he followed the directions he was given, and that HE was proud of the work he had done.

I did it myself...

So this morning was a big milestone for us.

As I've posted before, we have a pretty standard routine that we follow every morning before school. We end up heading downstairs for breakfast at about the same time every day. But today, for the first time, our schedule was a bit off.

First, I didn't want to get up myself, so was a few minutes late rousing the boy (somehow his alarm clock accidentally got turned off this week and I keep forgetting to turn it back on). Then, when I went to get him, he also didn't want to get up. After a little cajoling, he got up and climbed in the shower.

This just seemed to set our whole upstairs routine off by a few minutes. When it was time to head downstairs, I remembered that there was something on the computer that I needed to email to myself for access on my work computer. Of course, the computer was acting up and needed to be rebooted. So I sent Henry off in search of his shoes downstairs.

After a few minutes of messing with the computer, I realized how far behind schedule we were, so I called down to Henry to make sue he was picking his breakfast so he could eat as soon as I got down. He called back, "I already did it myself." Hmmm, curious.

When I arrived downstairs a minute later, I found that he had

• Gotten a bowl from the upper cabinets and a spoon from the silverware drawer
  
• Picked a pack of oatmeal and emptied it into the bowl
• Got the measuring cup (from another upper cabinet or dish drainer -- not sure which)
• Measured out 2/3 cup of milk and added it to his oatmeal
• Put the oatmeal in the microwave and set it to cook for 2 minutes
• Put the milk away
• Threw away the wrappers from the oatmeal packet

So there was the perfectly cooked oatmeal in the microwave, just waiting for me to lift the hot bowl out and add the frozen blueberries. I had no idea he could do all of that on his own. And he didn't make a mess and he cleaned up after himself. Wow, I must be doing something right!

Wordless Wednesday