Serengeti Plains (That's a grassland, you know.)

About a week and a half ago, Cameron brought home a bright yellow packet of information from school. The third graders were learning about habitats and each child would be responsible for making a diorama of the ecosystem they had been assigned. Parents were to help them gather supplies and send them to school by March 2nd. Today, in other words.

The teachers wanted the dioramas to be the child's work, not the parents, so they will be constructing the dioramas at school. The same theory applies to their animal reports. Parents here seem to want their kid to put the other kids to shame with their brilliance, so they "help" their child with the report by building a robotic replica of a raccoon that is wearing the skin of the poor animal that they sped up to hit with their Land Rover last week, and then all the learning opportunities for the child have been sucked up and swallowed by the self-serving parent. But I digress.

That bright yellow paper that Cameron brought home from school said that "every project should be the student's best work, so please plan ahead and don't leave it until the night before."

So last night we were frantically running from store to store, gathering supplies for this diorama. Cameron was to make a grasslands ecosystem depicting three living animals, three specific plants, three specific non-living things, (rocks and dirt are specific non-living things, right?), and one food chain including a producer, a consumer and a decomposer.

While the dioramas were to be constructed at school, the elements within them needed to be ready to go. So last night at nine o'clock Cameron began painting the background, gluing the ground base and sculpting animals from salt dough.

I have to say that I'm pretty impressed with his work. My only contribution was kneading the salt dough. He did the rest and feels confident that all the other kids will be jealous of his completed project, which is fine with me, because he owns it from the pipe cleaner trees to the model of the bloody impala.