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Diorama Dilemmas

Eleanor had a homework assignment this week: research a mammal, write 5 facts about this mammal (using best handwriting and editing), make a model of the animal in its natural habitat.

This could be fun, I thought. Eleanor had chosen the cheetah. My mind immediately started thinking about how we could do this... we have lots of shoeboxes. Hmm, don't cheetahs live in grasslands? Maybe we could paint grass...oh, or paint the sky and use yellow construction paper for the grass... We could use clay for the cheetah, or I know! That clay that gets hard when you bake it! We could make something that really looks great!

I hope you see what was happening to me before I did. I eventually managed to bite my tongue. I bit it very hard when Eleanor drew her initial sketch for the habitat as a rain forest. I merely suggested she look for a picture of a cheetah in its natural habitat before she created the background.

Sure enough, Eleanor came up with great ideas on her own. Some things I would have done differently, but I do have 30 more years experience. Some things were too hard (at least, they were too hard for me, maybe not for her...) so I guided her in a different direction. Air drying clay was one of these: painting seemed like a pain compared with sculpting. Some things she came up with on her own and were lots better than I could come up with---tissue paper for the grass in the grassland, for example.

I learned many things in this assignment (including many interesting facts about cheetahs). The one I need to remember most is that my instinct to take over in order to help my kids impress their teachers is as strong as my own need to impress the teachers ever was, and I need to squash it mercilessly. Stand back and watch, even if it leads to failure! That way we all learn something.

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