Teachers' Choice Award & the Geography Fair 2019

Every year, Lewie participates in our elementary school's academic fair.  The subjects rotate.  In first grade, it was a geography fair; in second grade, a science fair; in third grade, a history fair, and this year, it was a geography fair again.  (I'll admit that I enjoy the geography and history fairs the best.)

This year, Lewie chose to do his project on the Grand Canyon.  At first, I tried discouraging him: "Lewie, why do it on the Grand Canyon when you've already been there?  Don't you want to do research on a new place, like Yellowstone National Park?"  (We're planning on going there this summer.)

He thought about it for two seconds and replied, "Nope.  I want to do it on the Grand Canyon."  At that point, I gave up trying to convince him otherwise, and we became a team.  Using our state's inter-library loan service, we were able to take out four books on the Grand Canyon (from multiple libraries), and we spent our weeks reading them.  Each book, it seemed, focused on a different topic.  One spoke more about the history of the rock layers, another about the wildlife, and still another about human civilization.  Even though we went there in 2017, we quickly discovered there was still so much to learn!

For me, the biggest takeaways were about the rock layers and the history of the park.  The rock layers at the bottom of the canyon are close to two billion years old.  There's evidence through fossils that the canyon was covered by water several times.  Humans didn't start living in the canyon until 12,000 years ago.  There are pictographs in several areas, which demonstrate this fact.  We even saw them on our trip years ago.

In  1919, President Woodrow Wilson made the Grand Canyon into the Nation's Fifteenth National Park.  (This is after President Theodore Roosevelt made it a National Monument in 1908.)  The canyon had to be protected as sites were getting ruined by excavating and mining.  Still others, like the Fred Harvey Company, were purchasing land to be used for tourism.  If the Canyon didn't become a park, it ran the risk of getting bought up by people in the mining and tourist industries.

Here is the El Tovar Hotel, built from 1902-1905, by the Fred Harvey Company. The hotel is located by the Grand Canyon Railroad Station, a train that was built to bring hundreds if not thousands of tourists to the Canyon everyday.  It's interesting to learn that President Theodore Roosevelt didn't want the hotel; it was built before Roosevelt could declare the place a National Monument.  (We had lunch there on our trip; it was great to learn the history.)

If you ask Lewie about his favorite part of this project, he will say learning about the wildlife.  He also enjoyed going through our pictures from 2017. (We used about eight of them on the board, and some of them are now in this blog post.)  Here's a few of our favorites:

The Grand Canyon Railway has been in existence for over 100 years!  (Obviously they have newer trains today and not the steam locomotives from the late 1800's.)

Hubby getting too close to the edge!

The Elk we saw on our walk that stopped to get a 'selfie.'

As usual, I thoroughly enjoyed working on this project with Little Lewie, and in the end, he was right.  The Grand Canyon was perfect for the Geography Fair.  His passion must have came out because Little Lewie won the Teacher's Choice Award for Forth Grade.  (There was a winner in each grade.)  Lewie was so excited that he stood on stage speaking to the teachers for a minute.  One of my parent friends joked with me:  "I thought he was going to give an acceptance speech."

I gloated, "Me too."  (Evidently, Lewie felt it was necessary to let the teachers know how happy this made him.)

There's no doubt Lewie's award made me a proud mama.  I'm glad our first National Park trip inspired such an interest in nature, preservation, and wildlife.  This project only motivates me to plan more of these trips.  Yellowstone, here we come (in June)!

History Fair 2018

Every year, Lewie's elementary school runs a completely voluntary academic fair.  In first grade, it was a geography fair; in second grade, it was a science fair; and this year, it was a history fair.  At first, he joked with me and said he wanted to do his project on the history of Minecraft; however, when he knew I was not even considering the topic, he immediately selected Abraham Lincoln. 

I knew why he selected our 16th President.  First, we had read some interesting facts about him in the the book, Abe Lincoln at Last!  It was one of Lewie's favorite books from The Magic Tree House Series, so we set out to read it again.  However, we soon learned that Mary Pope Osborne and Natalie Pope Boyce wrote a nonfiction companion book to Abe Lincoln at Last called the Magic Tree House Fact Tracker: Abraham Lincoln. We discussed the differences between fiction and nonfiction and then read the Fact Tracker book to learn more about his childhood, life, and presidency.  The book was a real page-turner.  In less than four days, we read it cover to cover wishing there was more.  As we know, President Lincoln's life abruptly ends after he is assassinated by John Wilkes Booth.  When Lewie typed out all his facts, he refused to use the assassin's name:  "I don't want to use his name, Mommy," he said to me rather surprisingly.  "He shouldn't become famous for what he did." 

I was amazed that my nine year-old was so perceptive.  "Okay, we don't have to mention his name," I replied.  "You're right.  He's not the one that's important."

We reread the Fact Tracker book once more to decide what details we wanted to mention, and then Lewie set out to type them.  Since Lewie has been learning to type with the Keyboarding Without Tears Program, he was pretty quick.  I helped him with spelling, and before long, we started formatting the text to make it large enough for his tri-fold display board.  I was so proud to say that he truly typed everything by himself--this was a long way from his handwritten facts last year!

We selected pictures to accompany the text, and the rest, shall we say, is history. (HA!)  Actually, after we made the board, we decided to make a short video, too.  I dressed Lewie in his soon-to-be First Communion outfit, and we put on an Abraham Lincoln beard and hat that we bought from Amazon.  Then, he read the Gettysburg Address.  Although this famous speech is relatively short (only ten sentences), the words are difficult.  Even after practicing it all weekend long, Lewie still struggled with some of the word pronunciation.  However, his mistakes were charming; they were representative of his nine year-old self--a snapshot in time that I will forever savor.

 

The final piece to the project was to teach Lewie how to cite References.  I showed him how to plug in information using the KnightCite Citation Service, and he soon learned how to format both the Fact Tracker book and the movie, Lincoln.  (The movie did show some Civil War violence, but on the whole, it gave Lewie some perspective on this period in history--their dress, their way of speaking, the White House, etc. etc.)

In all, we really enjoyed working on our project this year.  Lewie did a very good job "getting into character," and he learned how history can be fun!  I'm a little sad it's over; I think I'm going to continue seeking out books about Lincoln--what a fascinating life story!