The Colombia Project

The evening of Tuesday, May 29, the night before Justin and I left for Sunriver, Jason approached me about needing to bring in some Columbian food on Friday for his project.  When I asked what project he was referring to he explained he’d selected the country Columbia to do a research project on.  Everything was due on Friday.  I hadn’t seen him working on any project.  He assured me he’d done a lot of it at school on his google drive.  He dug out a crinkled up packet of paper from his backpack that explained the scope of the project and I about died.  He had to put together bits of research that added up to 100 points. For example, 10pts if you write about the countries transportation, 10pts if you bring in native food, 10pts for drawing the country flag, etc…  All of this had to be displayed on a tri-fold poster board and presented to the class, and parents on Friday.  There was an RSVP attached to the paper that was to be returned to the school by May 24 – nearly a week ago.  Clearly Jason knew about the project for ages.  This was all news to me and I was leaving town in just a matter of hours.  I told him he needed to find out first thing in the morning if the presentation board was being provided at school and if they would be putting it together during class.  I found a recipe for arepas online – technically a Venezuelan dish, but at this point that was close enough.  I went to the store to get the needed masa flour and that was the extent I would be able to help him pull this thing together.  He wasn’t concerned at all.  Stating again that he had a lot of it already typed out on his google drive.  I couldn’t bring myself to take a look at his research thus far because the I knew the perfectionist in me wouldn’t be able to handle what I found.  I washed my hands of it and decided this would perhaps be a lesson learned for Jason.

Jason sent me a text the following afternoon, just after we’d arrived in Bend and told me we needed to get the display board ourselves.  Thankfully I have a daughter with a driver’s license so Abigail had to put her studying for finals aside and take all the littles into Issaquah to find a presentation board.  Bless her responsible heart.  Apparently Jason didn’t “feel” like working on it that night, which I found out after he’d already gone to bed.  I told Carly to wake him up early the next morning, before she left for school and tell him to get moving!  I think our sitter was able to help him get everything printed out so he could start piecing it all together.  I told her to keep him home from early morning band practice so he could really make some headway.  He was able to finish it by working on after school and into the evening.  Our sitter had to wake him up early again on Friday and help him make the “Columbian Arepas” to take to school for the cultural feast. 

In the end it all got done and to my surprise he ended up getting a 4 (exceeds expectations) on it.  I think his teacher liked that he picked Columbia because she’s taking a two year teaching position there starting in the fall.  I wish he would have chosen a country that we will be visiting this summer, but he sure does look up to Miss V so I’m not at all surprised.

Jason is a smart kid for sure, but he’s a touch lazy and a clearly has a tendency to procrastinate.  Heaven help us both as he enters middle school in a few short months!

And since we’re posted about Jason’s school projects here’s a couple I recently took pictures of since they are too big to fit in his file folder.

Jason chose this lion piece as his favorite and displayed it during the school art show.  The lion on the left depicts the “realist” and the lion on the right depicts “stylized”

This one was painted for a musicians theme in art

  

The back of this piece was labeled “20th Century Art” but when I asked Jason about it he said it was about “feelings”