Do you, at the end of the school year, when all the binders and the art and the whatnot come home in the various bags, do anything appropriate with them? I’m trying to make sure that Sam and Lily understand that their school work is VERY IMPORTANT to us. But those piles have been sitting in the hall for weeks.
So this weekend I piled them up on the dining room table, and tonight Lily seized on hers and sat down with it.
“I want to show you some of my work!” she declared.
I confess to feeling a little less than enthusiastic. I was reading (finally) Cinderella Ate My Daughter and trying to go with the whole “set a good example by reading in the evening” thing, which is of course in my own best interest in so many ways. Rob was even sitting there too, reading the New Yorker. A perfect scene!
But ok. Your work. I would love to look at your work!
And I would, but Lily’s idea of showing me her work was to attempt to read to me, every single page of her “Introduction to Writing” workbook. As in, every sentence she was supposed to identify as a “telling” sentence. Every sample “letter to a friend.”
Wahhh. Snooze.
As bedtime approached, I grew suspicious. Lily was not reading her book for school. Or practicing the violin. Or cleaning her doll area in the playroom. “Just one more page! Just one more thing! I just really want to show you this!”
Yeah, right.
After this reading, after I’d finally pushed her off to do her own work for the evening, I found, underneath all the rest, something I really WANTED her to show me–three or four stories she’d written for school. A lemonade stealing ant. A flood that turned into a swimming opportunity. I was sincerely interested. She was sincerely pleased. Happy all ’round.
But before that, I think I was getting played.
One very clever solution I read about to deal with all the papers and art work is to ask the kids to pick out their favorite pieces from the year, scan them(or take pictures) and then make a photo book out of them. That way everything is neat and tidy, and the kids have a nice souvenir of that year once they’re grown.