The Science Fair

For weeks now, Christian has been working on his science fair project. Literally weeks...with an emphasis on the "s" :) Each of the fourth grade students was asked to research an animal native to this area and Christian, of course, chose to do his research project on snakes...specifically, the Western Rattlesnake. Together, we have read just about everything there is to be found. We have spent many, many a late night writing long, detailed paragraphs for his paper. I have mentioned in a previous post, how hard Christian has to work to complete written assignments. Writing, for him, is just hard. Plain hard. But, in his infectiously enthusiastic way, he trudged his way through that paper one late night after another. Two of his teachers have even told me how excited he has been in class about the information he has been learning and how that excitement had rubbed off on the other students.

Once his paper was finished, he completed a trifold poster with maps, drawings, pictures, facts and even wrote a poem about snakes. For his display, he had snake sheddings, a real rattlesnake skin (complete with the rattle still attached) and had downloaded the sound of a rattler from an internet site. He had his brother's i-home rigged up under his desk rattling away. But for him, there was just one thing missing...the "real deal". You see, many students were able to bring the actual snake, lizard, crayfish, etc. in for the fair. But, when you choose to do your report on a rattlesnake, well, there's just no way to do that. I know, call me impossible.

This has been hard for an 10 year old boy to understand, especially when he wants nothing more than to win a prize for his hard work. Christian doesn't usually get caught up in "winning". In fact, he has always been the kind of kid who is genuinely happy when others succeed...he still is. But for some reason, this science fair has been SO important to him. He tried over and over again to convince me to let him bring his corn snake to the fair claiming it was a relative to the Western Rattlesnake :) He tried to tell me that because his corn snake, Severus, is shedding, it would be the perfect illustration for how the rattle buttons are formed during molting. He tried just about everything to convince me that unless he had the "real deal", there would be no possible way the judges would be interested in his project.

Christian and I had several conversations about what the most important aspects of a science fair project are and how winning isn't everything. But tonight at the school, as they read his name as the 1st place winner, I realized that sometimes, to a sweet, hard-working boy, winning is everything. And once in awhile, that's o.k. Congratulations Christian!

On the way home, Michael told me that next year, he is going to do his project on the badger. Don't be getting any ideas, Michael. No badgers at the science fair :) Seriously.