A couple of weeks ago, the little man had a project to do for school. This particular project was assigned by the Media Specialist.....um, for those who went to school (like me) prior to the super-secret-renaming of faculty-event, that would be the Librarian. Now, why and when the name changed, I don't know. Remember we're late to this parenting a school-aged child thing. Anyway....
So, this project was a research paper of sorts. Thelibrarian, oops, media specialist (!) helped him research his subject: tigers. She had helped him write out several key points and then sent the information home for him to use to write his paper. As we sat going through the information together, well....somewhat together....SOMEone wasn't too thrilled to be sitting at the table doing homework, when, quite possibly he might be missing his very favorite show that he's seen a thousand times and ohmygoodness! I-just-can't-sit-here-any-longer-Mama-because-I'm-soooooo-tiiiiirrrrredddd-and-do-we-have-to-do-this-noooooowww?????
Around this time, the Daddy came in to save the day; my glaring and threatening of bodily harm obviously wasn't working. He sat down at the table, reviewed the instructions for the paper and we all worked on it together. We had a pretty good system: Ben would read the information, we'd discuss it and then we'd decide if it needed to be included in the report. It only needed to be three paragraphs, so it wasn't all that detailed. Our paragraphs were to include what tigers eat, where do tigers live, and how many cubs do tigers usually have. To make sure the finished product was as neat as could be, Ben dictated the information - in his words - to me, as I wrote it onto a separate piece of paper.
We'd finally finished gathering the information, so he started to transfer the information over in his handwriting. Roles were reversed: I dictated, he wrote. I allowed him to have some freedom with his spelling, that is, unless he was really off on a particular word - I allowed a fair amount of mistakes, planning to come back at the completion of the paper to make corrections.
Minutes pass. Time to proof-read and correct mistakes; more groaning and whining ensue. Ok, so maybe it wasn't such a good idea to let him write everything out and then expect him to correct his mistakes afterward. Whatever.
At the point in the paper covering what tigers eat, I observed the following portion of a sentence, as written by Ben:
".....a tigers diet can include beer, badgers, rabbits...."
As I'm reading the sentence aloud to him, I say,
"...a tigers diet can include beer and pretzels...."
By now, he's sitting on my lap, so he snapped his head around, giving me a surprised look and tells me that's not what it says!
I picked up the paper to peer at it closely and said, "Oh! Just beer! Ok, I see. A tigers diet can include beer. Hmm. I didn't know that."
It takes a few minutes of giggling and me forcing him to re-read his sentence for him to see that he'd written beer instead of deer.
Yes, we corrected it.
Even though I do know a few Tigers whose diets consist of beer and pretzels. Just sayin'.
So, this project was a research paper of sorts. The
Around this time, the Daddy came in to save the day; my glaring and threatening of bodily harm obviously wasn't working. He sat down at the table, reviewed the instructions for the paper and we all worked on it together. We had a pretty good system: Ben would read the information, we'd discuss it and then we'd decide if it needed to be included in the report. It only needed to be three paragraphs, so it wasn't all that detailed. Our paragraphs were to include what tigers eat, where do tigers live, and how many cubs do tigers usually have. To make sure the finished product was as neat as could be, Ben dictated the information - in his words - to me, as I wrote it onto a separate piece of paper.
We'd finally finished gathering the information, so he started to transfer the information over in his handwriting. Roles were reversed: I dictated, he wrote. I allowed him to have some freedom with his spelling, that is, unless he was really off on a particular word - I allowed a fair amount of mistakes, planning to come back at the completion of the paper to make corrections.
Minutes pass. Time to proof-read and correct mistakes; more groaning and whining ensue. Ok, so maybe it wasn't such a good idea to let him write everything out and then expect him to correct his mistakes afterward. Whatever.
At the point in the paper covering what tigers eat, I observed the following portion of a sentence, as written by Ben:
".....a tigers diet can include beer, badgers, rabbits...."
As I'm reading the sentence aloud to him, I say,
"...a tigers diet can include beer and pretzels...."
By now, he's sitting on my lap, so he snapped his head around, giving me a surprised look and tells me that's not what it says!
I picked up the paper to peer at it closely and said, "Oh! Just beer! Ok, I see. A tigers diet can include beer. Hmm. I didn't know that."
It takes a few minutes of giggling and me forcing him to re-read his sentence for him to see that he'd written beer instead of deer.
Yes, we corrected it.
Even though I do know a few Tigers whose diets consist of beer and pretzels. Just sayin'.
