Kintropy In Action

A couple weeks ago, after Gabriel got off the bus, he started screaming.

"Oh no! I left it on the bus."

"What Gabriel?"

"The chicken thingy"

"What chicken thingy?"

He then decided everything was OK and proceeded home. The next day the neighbor called. "Does Gabriel want his turkey homework? A. (Her son) brought it home, he found it on the floor of the bus and thinks it is Gabriel's."

We went to get it. It was a long tan paper curled into a tube. It had some nice creases from spending overnight on the bus. When we got home I unrolled it. It was a giant outline of a turkey with the following directions:

I stared at it on the kitchen table as Gabriel went off to play a video game. This was the second home art project. My son does not like to cut, paste, glue or color. I am an artist and believe me I have tried setting up art projects before. The last project was an all about me project poster where I made him sit next to me and help pick out pictures to print out to paste to the poster. I pushed him through cutting things out where after just one cut on a piece of paper sent him into excuses of other things to do.

He also starts by saying, "I can't do it!"

I always respond with "Yes, you can!"

Then his quality control is his next line of defense. "I'm no good at it. I can't cut straight."

"You have to practice in order to be good at something. That is what these projects are about, practicing. You couldn't do a forward roll well when you first learning. You practiced and now you’re great at them."

He then zones off into space. "Can I go play a video games?"

"No, we need to finish your homework." he then plays around, he won't pick up the scissors. When I leave him alone to work on it he has a meltdown if he makes a jagged edge. I've never made an issue about mistakes, but he acts like it's the end of the world and we go back through the previous dialogue. He then goes through a series of asking to play video games till I've told him he will loose them for the day if he doesn't stop asking. The whole time he is still working on the first cut out.

So this all ran through my head along with my frazzled phone call at the end of the project where I called my neighbor who is actually a teacher and explained how I was afraid that I did most of the work. She told me to relax, that the point of this type of Homework for Kindergartners was to have the parents and children work together. The idea is that the parents show the kids how important the homework is. She said the other point is to get the parents and kids talking to each other about school. She said the teachers know that kids this young are not self-starters.

With this in mind I let go and looked at the Turkey with fresh eyes. It had a big body and seven prominent feathers sticking out of it. I decided to use the project as a place to discuss Thanksgiving and the pilgrims.

So I asked Gabriel to name seven things he was thankful for. He named Luigi (from Mario Bros), Tae Kwon Doe, Sweets, and Superheroes. He ran out of ideas after this so I suggested Daddy, Hannah and me. He liked those ideas. So I made pages of repeating pictures of the seven subjects listed above then used those to make the different feathers. I had him paste those on as we talked about thanksgiving.

For the body I made a repeating pattern of a boat that looked like the Mayflower super imposed with a photo of Plymouth Rock. I also had a repetitive pattern of the pilgrims’ hats and an old ink drawing of native Americans. They made up the details of the main bird.

The last piece was for the little wing. I took out stickers of the different planet and asked him what planet did he think people would explore next. He choose Pluto. We finished it off with a googling eye and some glitter outline detail. He had me write his name because his focus was gone.

Of course the only thing he retained from the conversation was that the Pilgrims traveled on a boat and a lot of people died.

I had fun and Gabriel endured it like a champ.

--Mom