Noah's 3-D Dinosaur

As far as the homework load in kindergarten goes, well, we have gotten off pretty easy. Noah gets all his assignments at the beginning of the week and has until Friday to finish them. Some weeks we can finish it all in one day if we just power through - which is good, because our evenings have gotten pretty busy. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago a sheet came home in his folder explaining about a geometry project that was due and my heart dropped. Here we go, I thought. Here come all the projects that are supposed to be for the kids but end up being work for the parents!

And I was kind of right. It was mostly a lot of work for me - do I really want my almost 6 year old operating a hot glue gun or a can of spray paint? - but I did my best to have Noah and his ideas be an integral part of the process so that he could legitimately claim the project as his own.

The assignment was to build an animal using three dimensional shapes. Basically with items you have around your house. (Boxes, paper towel rolls, etc.) Then you had to paint it and decorate it and bring it in to school and present it to the class.

Is anyone shocked that when I asked Noah what animal he was picking, he brought our his dinosaur book and pointed to the Ankylosaurus?

We spent the first afternoon building the frame of the dino. I used an oatmeal box for the body, toilet paper rolls for the legs, and those Styrofoam balls for the tail and head. Noah helped me pick out all the shapes and figure out how to arrange them, and then he documented our work while I anchored the body parts with paper clips, duct tape, and glue.

That evening, Wes took it out to the backyard and spray painted the whole thing brown. Then we let it dry overnight. The next afternoon, Noah sat down with Bebe and they started the process of decorating him with paint and shapes cut out of construction paper.

Noah did a great job of painting and helping us figure out how to position the dino's spikes and eyes. (Kudos to Wes for coming up with the idea of using cork board pins for the eyes. Would we expect any less from our resident optometrist?) Noah was very proud the next morning when he got to take the finished product to school.

And by golly, I think it really did end up looking like the picture of the Ankylosaurus!

Phew! We have survived our first school project!