Carli's GT Project

We have confirmed that Carli is still a very strong willed, opinionated child.  :)  Her GT class did a project over the presidents of the United States.  They were going to do a living museum and give a speech on their president.  Carli was assigned Thomas Jefferson.  She thoroughly enjoyed the research part.  She enjoyed planning her display and shopping for all the stuff to do it, it was after all pretty close to doing art!  But when it came time to talk about how she would dress...that was another story!

Carli was NOT going to dress up like a boy.  That was just "weird" and she wasn't going to do it.  After attempting to talk to her about it several times she announced she would be making a big nickel and she'd stick her head through it b/c Thomas Jefferson was on the nickel.  Okay, well, I decided I better enlist the help of her teacher since I was making no headway.  Her teacher confirmed that the nickel idea was not really what she had in mind but she had to give her credit for the creative thinking and told us that it would be okay.  Well alrighty.  So we made plan to make a big nickel...

But then someone suggested that Carli dress as Thomas Jefferson's wife and she decided that was a good idea too!  Argh!  I wasn't going to attempt to even make such a costume, so we ordered one online and it turned out pretty stinkin' cute.  But she said we still had to make a nickel!

Do you know how hard it is to explain what a speech is to a 2nd grader?  And then to get them to write one?  It is hard.  We enlisted the advice of Grammy and she suggested the Carli write a letter to Naggy telling her all about Thomas Jefferson and from there we could turn the letter into a speech.  That worked really well and the speech writing wasn't nearly the nightmare I feared.  It took us four days working on it a bit at a time but we got it done and she practiced giving her speech to anyone who would listen!  She definitely knew her Thomas Jefferson facts by the time it was due!

The living museum was on President's Day.  Each class from 1st Grade through 3rd Grade walked through the gym and the kids were scattered around the gym to tell them about their President.  When we figured out that they weren't going to have more than a few minutes with each class we got Carli to put her speech down and just use her board and nickel and tell them about her President.  She did awesome!  Her butterflies went away and she thoroughly enjoyed herself!

Write that one down in the books.  First big project completed and we all survived.  Now just think...next year Ava will be doing a GT project along with Carli.  Ya'll start praying for me now!