Teepee Schmeepee

These daggum projects. Who in the heck do these teachers think they’re foolin’? When you get a piece of paper home that says something to the effect, “Create a dwelling used for the (insert Indian type here- in our case Plains Indians) and then write a paragraph… yada yada yada yada”. This smacks of FAMILY project since the student is in SECOND GRADE!!! Geez.

So we jump on the internet… or rather I do with him in my lap… ever typed with a 7 year old sitting in your lap? I always get distracted and start smooching on his cheeks. He hates that. I digress… so I jump on the internet and pull up all these pictures of teepees as well as data with regard to the dwellings and habits. I have real issues with doing my kid’s homework. I passed 2nd grade, thank.you.very.much. I don’t mind assisting.

As good fortune would have it, I rummaged through the kitchen and found some wooden skewers we used last when The Great Omnipotent One was visiting and made his famous 3 layer carrot cake… we used skewers for keeping the layers from sliding. So with construction paper, wooden skewers, a box top from an old cardboard storage box, markers and plastic animals, we set out to create this dwelling compound.

I showed him what was the most efficient way, giving him multiple options and telling him the only thing I would do is actually assemble the teepees after he was finished putting his artistic touches on the construction paper. He spent a considerable amount of time and it looks really good, but this is where the 2nd grader came out.

I walk out of the room FOR FIVE MINUTES, when I hear much weeping and gnashing of teeth. I walk in to find my 7 year old sitting in a heap on the floor crying. It seems he had a fistful of plastic animals he wanted to glue to his landscape and his Dad told him no. Not the approach I use, so I walked over and calmly explained that when the teepee stands 6 inches high, a 4 inch butterfly is not realistic. I had already gotten him a wolf and a snake and thought he was fine. Now suddenly I have gargantuan frogs and butterflies he is ready to glue.

We compromised which means I got rid of the hugely ridiculous through logic and reasoning and he got to keep the ‘sort of kind of’ ridiculous because I decided it was HIS project. Below is a picture and you will find that there are African and ocean ‘animals and such’, as well as some entomological radiation disaster in his American Plains Indian Teepee Project.

You will notice a snake so long that surely it is the equivalent of a 50 foot Anaconda. You will also see a lady bug, the offspring of something that evidently got caught in Chernobyl. There’s a turtle that surely came from a great ocean and not from that river. And then if you look real close in one of the corners, you’ll see a Lion. We forwent the elephant.