The Science Fair

We have thought and worked much on the science fair for the last few weeks. Jonah, especially, was intensely interested. Unfortunately, he was so intensely interested that he was extremely grumpy about the whole thing. Finally, we just threw our hands in the air and told him that he was on his own. Steve did help him create the graphs, but he just did it all himself. I told his teacher that she would at least know that it was his own work.
Caleb, on the other hand, put a lot of time into making sure that his papers were straight and made sense. We knew that there were very many third grade entries and felt pretty good about his.
Jonah took his to school last week and came home kind of sad about it after seeing everybody else's boards. They were beautiful, whereas his looked like a ten year old boy had done it. I went and saw the boards and he was right, some of them were lovely. I was pretty sure that this would be a good lesson on not having a fit. Then, I went back after school to help put the ribbons on and I watched them finish their voting. They found that each judge had a little different standard, so rather than just going by the numbers on the papers, they had each judge pick his favorite one or two from the fifth and sixth grades and they gathered these together. Then, they went as a group to each project and spent 90 minutes whittling the 20 down to 5 honorable mentions and 5 winners. I cannot express the shock I felt when I saw Jonah's board on the final table, much less when he was moved to the group of winners. He happened to be with me because he had debate after school, so he saw that his board had been moved and was by where all of the judges were. Luckily, the winners group was a little bit into the middle, so he didn't know it was him. I then spent the next two hours saying how nice it was to have even been considered, and that maybe next year he could do even better. Then, we went to the awards night and Caleb did win and was very cute in his excitement. Jonah was in the last group they called out and he was looking a little down in the mouth. He was so surprised and excited to find out that he won. He was amazed and we were excited for him. We were not so excited about the good lesson we taught him about being patient and not biting the hand that was feeding him. Instead we had a lesson on helping people not feel bad about not winning because we knew that some of his friends were kind of upset. He did take that one to heart, but I don't know that he won't have a fit the next time something like this comes along. Parenting lessons often seem to work out better in books.