The Magic Treehouse Book, Art Contest, Conservation

Even though Tyler told me he would never, ever read it since I got him to check it out at the library, I made him read the first 5 chapters yesterday for reading. My plan was that it had dinosaurs so he would be interested, he would start reading it, and he would like it. Turns out my plan worked. He complained that he didn’t want to read it and told me he would just sit there staring at the pages, but not read it. I let him do it because I knew he’d get bored and either complain more or start reading. Soon I heard, “Mommy, this treehouse was in one oak tree and then it went to another oak tree and the boy touched a dinosaur and saw another one.” He had started reading. It turns out he really likes the book so far and wants to read more of them. Score one for me!!! It doesn’t always happen, so I’ll take my wins where I can.

Yesterday he also decided that he wanted to enter the art contest I was telling you about. Here’s the info on it: http://www.elkhartcountyparks.org/childrensartcontest07.htm He also had decided what he was going to do and he wanted soft pastels (the chalk like ones) to do it. So we stopped by Hobby Lobby yesterday for some heavier paper (no framing or mounting allowed for this contest), but it had to be 8 1/2 x 11, which is a hard to find size in drawing paper. Most drawing paper is 9 x 12. Then we found a box of 48 pastels for like $5. Ben, his art teacher at the Elkhart Art League, has told us that the cheap ones work just fine for kids because they use them up so quickly. I’m glad that’s what he says because my pocketbook would not survive many purchases of things if we went with the expensive ones. We found one set of 10 pastels for $35 and that was definitely off the list. Then we picked up a thing of charcoal because Tyler says that’s what they use during classes to sketch out what they are going to color. In all I spent a little over $13 on those 3 things and Tyler is way beyond happy about it. Now the fact that he has changed his creation to something different and it is too detailed to use the pastels so he’s using colored pencils is a whole different situation. I have no doubt that he will use those pastels on something and it will be soon. I also gave him some drawing paper that I had that is 14 x 17, so he has some bigger pieces of paper to work other things on.

Which brings me to my little environmentalist. As you all know, I’m an environmentalist and Tyler has been raised hearing me talk about lots of these things. I’ve always advocated things with him like using both sides of pieces of paper unless he’s colored with marker since those tend to bleed through the paper. He has decided to take things a little farther than that lately. I now know why, but first I will show you examples of this. It started a while ago. He complained that my lesson plans are written on paper that I keep in a notebook. He asked me if I couldn’t do that on the computer instead. I have a list of books that I want to read. It totals around 375 right now, but our library only has about 150 of them. I have a printed list that I take with me to the library that lists the title, author and call number so I’m not just searching the library or waiting to use the computers there. Tyler wants to know if there is a way for me to take the list with me, but not have it printed out. He’s also concerned about the calender that I have with information on it like sports schedules for the nephew and niece, art class schedule, etc. He wants me to do that in the email program (i.e. Microsoft Outlook) like he does. He has been telling me that writing his spelling words and taking all those tests on paper is a waste of paper. Then I started noticing that he is hyphenating words when he writes his sentences containing his spelling words and he is telling me he will only write short sentences because they take up less space. Yesterday, he hyphenated the word “You”. He put the “Y-” on one side of the paper and the “ou” on the other side. Now we have talked about hyphenating words before, that’s why he knows you can do that, but we have now started talking about how there are rules for hyphenating. He thinks the rules are stupid and thinks it is wasting paper for him to not use that little bit of space up. Then he told me yesterday that he wishes that he could practice his sketches on the computer instead of on other pieces of paper because then he wouldn’t be wasting paper and he could work out the details of the sketch (like sizes of things, etc) before he wastes paper. So I asked him where this “wasting paper” campaign came from. It turns out that at the Art League during his art classes that they don’t get practice paper and that Ben has told them that there isn’t a lot of extra paper so they need to use it wisely. I’m sure most of that comes from the fact that they have limited supplies due to funding restrictions, but my little one has turned it into a campaign to not waste paper overall.

So I have a campaign today: figure out a way to put the school lesson plans on the computer so I’m not wasting paper (shouldn’t be too hard – the data entry will be the longer part of that), figure out if I can find a charging/syncing cradle for a Palm Vx that Trent got a while ago but that came without that cradle so that maybe I could use that for things like my book list, and research art software to find out if they have ones that also come with a drawing tablet that we can get so he can do his practice sketches on the computer. Maybe then Tyler can relax about paper some. Though it is nice to know that my little one can hear what myself and others say about saving resources and take it to an even better level of conservation.

I think I might also use this as an opportunity to talk more about charity. He knows about it some as his Grams & Grandpa Randy get the grandkids a gift of some animal from Heifer International (http://www.heifer.org/) for Christmas. It took a lot of explaining for them to understand that they aren’t getting the animal, but that the animal is being donating in their name. They all understand and are now picking out the animals that they want donated. We also do other charity things, like Goodwill, etc. So I’ll have figure out how to transition those to the Elkhart Art League’s wish list and see if he’s interested in getting some paper for the Art League. Should be interesting as I never know what to expect from him.