Leaving

After several days of staring at leaves and flipping through books and websites trying to identify those leaves, Darby's latest science project is finally done.

It took some extra parental work just to get it done on time (it's due tomorrow). I skipped lunch today, went outside and spent the whole hour looking for more leaves. Darby's mom did some additional leaf gathering as well, getting six mosquito bites in the process.

Turns out this assignment was rather more difficult than the last. Leaves are surprisingly more difficult to identify than bugs. With a bug, everything you need to identify it is self-contained. You don't need much context. With leaves, if you find one that is rather typical looking, it's very difficult to identify without context. Such as how the leaves were arranged on the branch, what kind of fruit was on the tree, etc. We had way more than the 25 requisite leaves going into the weekend, but as we started to identify the leaves we learned quickly that it would have been better to identify the leaf BEFORE removing it from the tree. We had to get rid of more than half the leaves we started with because we just didn't have enough context, thus the extra parental effort this afternoon.

I really wish they would stop giving the kids assignments that were practically impossible for the kids to get done on their own. This past weekend I tried to have Darby sit there with the stack of five tree/leaf identification books we checked out from the library to determine what some of the leaves were and she "got tired of it" after only an hour, plus she didn't get a single identification right. This was after I had been identifying leaves for several hours. I just don't think she could have gotten it done without A LOT of help, and that doesn't seem as productive or educational to me. I made her write out all of the labels and glue all of the leaves to the poster board, plus she helped find some of the leaves, but I can't say she learned as much (I tried to explain much, but am not sure it took) as if the approach were different. For example, if the teacher brought in a bag of common leaves and as a class exercise they went through the bag together and identified the leaves via a structured method using a botanical field guide.

Anyway, I'm glad it's done, and I am NOT looking forward to the next project.