The California Missions project in 4th grade is a fairly standard assignment. I'm not sure how the grading is done, because I've never seen all the grades for all the students, for any given year, -but I do know how one student feels about it, since I had a student who didn't get a kit for it (becuase I didn't know about the kits back then) in my family. My daughter made a mission out of cereal boxes. Compared to several of the other missions in her class, it was pretty pathetic, and my daughter still remembers that. The grading in 4th grade is not major- it is afterall the first year the children get grades, but she still remembers the feeling, although I'm not sure she remembers the grade.
As for middle school projects, our middle school does assign projects that require special materials to get a good grade (unless the kid happens to be unusually gifted, I suppose). My daughter was told to make a castle, in 7th grade, at the end of term. No instructions were given because the instructor wanted the students to be "creative". My daughter started out trying to make one out of cardboard. It looked awful, but she spent a lot of time on it, and I certainly wasn't going to say anything. Then the other castles started coming in. They had little people on them she told me. They had model vegetation. They were fancy. So we went out and bought foam blocks and spray paint and made her a castle out of that. Was it expensive? Not for us- but for a child it would have been. The foam blocks cost about 12.00 in total- not small potatos to a child who isn't being helped at all by parents. The spray paint was another couple of bucks. We are in a very competitive school system, I grant you. I am sure there are schools where almost no parents help their children. But having gone the route of not helping our daughter, on the theory that she was supposed to do it herself, I can't say I recommend that. What she seemed to learn from that was that not only was she getting screwed by her classmates and the school but her parents were also willing to see her sink. And we are not. |
