5th Grade Homework is Rough!

Fifth grade homework is not a walk in the park. It involves a whole lot more than reading for 20 minutes a day. Loch Monster and I have spent the last month working on his USA Scrapbook. He had to create some kind of ABC book of the United States that included the following: 5 states, 5 famous Americans, 5 famous events, 5 important places, and 6 other topics relating to the United States - plus - a title page, table of contents, bibliography and cover page. Phew!! We finished it on Wednesday - a whole week ahead of the deadline. Eric and I helped him come up with his 26 topics and then I helped him research each letter (thank heavens for Wikipedia!!!) and assemble each scrapbook page. This was Loch's first research project so we had a little bit of a learning curve to work through. I helped him research A - U - describe it, find the interesting facts, write it in his own words, etc. Things were crazy this week and he was left to research V - Z on his own. He finally got around that learning curve, though, and did great on those last few letters all by himself. I'm so proud of him!!! He did 95% of the work on his project (I did the cover, title, table of contents and bibliography pages). He muddled through the learning curve, the frustrations of harder work and even a couple of migraines. And he's truly the sweetest boy ever - he was quite emotional as he hugged me and thanked me for all the help I gave him with this project. That's all the reward a mom really needs!!

Here's my 3 most favorite pages in the entire scrapbook. D was for the Declaration of Independance and E was for the Emancipation Proclamation. On each of their Wikipedia pages were pictures of the actual documents. I saved a copy of the picture and then blew it up to an 8 1/2 x 11 image and printed it on cream colored paper. Then the best part - I burned the edges using the stovetop element to create the antique look. So instead of a plain colored background for those two pages, the "actual" documents were the background. How cool is that?!?!?! (Thankfully, I did this when all the kids were at school. That's all I need - for the girls to learn the latest way to have fun! And for future reference - be sure to have doors and windows open before burning edges of paper.) There's nothing super special about the actual page of the Twin Towers but 9/11 is a sensitive topic for me. I went into labor with Sweet Pea while we watched the events of that day unfold. She was born the next morning but we'll always know how long it's been since the tragedy.

To save you some key strokes and curiosity fits, here's what he did for each letter: Arkansas, George W. Bush, California, Declaration of Independence, Emancipation Proclamation, Benjamin Franklin, Grand Canyon, House of Representatives, Independence Day, JFK Assassination, Martin Luther King Jr., Lincoln Memorial, Mount Rushmore, New Jersey, Ohio, Michael Phelps, Queen Mary Ship, Theodore Roosevelt, Statue of Liberty, Twin Towers, Utah, Valley Forge, World War II, Richard M. Nixon, Yankee Stadium, and Zion National Park. (What would you have done for the letter X?)

We learned some really interesting things about our country and its people. My most favorite piece of unknown information is that Pres. Roosevelt didn't have a vice president for his first term in office. Honest! Click it out.

Loch Monster, I'm so proud of you! You did awesome!