Anybody else get this in their head while doing the Blends project?
For those of you who don’t have a first grader at my kid’s school, the Blends Project is 30% of their grade. Basically, the teacher gives you a list of 20 “blends” – blends are letter combinations, such as “br” and “ch.” The kids have to come up with four words for each blend (CH: Choir, Chorus, Chorizo, Chair). Then, the kids have to draw or cut out pictures representing each of the words. Each cutout must be of a size that it will fit into one fourth of one 20th of a large piece of poster board. Confused? Yeah, the kids are supposed to divide their poster board into 20 equal parts, and each of those parts will contain four pictures. The pictures are then labeled with the name of the word they represent.
Note that I say “the kids” are supposed to be doing all of this. As if kids in first grade can do all of this. Me? I am lucky, in that my kid learned all his blends two to three years ago, so he had no problem coming up with his own words. (Don’t even get me started on the fact that they are not differentiating this project at all for the kids who are strong readers and already know their blends.) Other parents are not so lucky – they have to help their kids figure out four words for each blend.
What ends up happening is that the parents then go to the computer and google clipart that corresponds to the word. Then they print it all out for the kid to cut out. Then the parent has to divide the squares on the poster board. (I mean, come on! How many first graders could figure that out?)
So, basically, if the kids don’t know their blends yet, then the parents end up doing half the work. Even for my kid, who knows his, I end up having to do the clip art portion (took me TWO HOURS last night to google, and cut and paste, and print, the 80 images.) The plus to this is that Rollie and I spent some quality time together. By quality time, I mean that he and i did the images, while Tiller cried under the computer desk, rolling around at my feet, wailing about how bored she was, and I didn’t finish my laundry.
A negative to this whole thing might be that my son did not learn a DAMN thing. Oh! Except for the following “enlightening” images that came up while searching for words he already knew how to spell.
Interesting things that come up on Google Images while searching for pictures of words for Blends project:
drug (people smoking pot, shooting heroin, laying passed out next to an open and spilled bottle of pills with a bottle of bourbon in hand, pot leaf, bong, bag of weed, cartoons with needles hanging out of people’s arms.)
brown (pile of poop, naked African American woman, James Brown mugshot)
Drown (pictures of drowning victims, scary illustrations of drowning people)
Drink (OH GOD, Alt+Tab!)
frenzy (wolves tearing apart some animal, creepy cartoons with people foaming at the mouth, zombie melee)
prank – (one KKK poster, a rear end mooning the camera)
glowstick (rave photos, symbols of hands holding glowsticks up in the air, Rollie: “What’s a rave?”)
spank (Are you kidding me? Me: Don’t you want to pick another word? That one is kind of negative. Rollie: Why? It’s just hitting on the bottom? Me: sigh. Ok. [praying as i hit google], Oh, no, that one is not good. Rollie: Mama, what is? Me: Don’t worry about that one, honey.)
spa (who knew there were so many asian “spa” pictures online?)
blonde? (I don’t even need to describe what came up for this one, right?)
Slip (lots of disturbing photos and cartoons about the band slipknot. R: Mama, what is a slipknot? Me: A kind of knot. R: For putting around your neck?)
Gee. Education is great.