'Cause We All Just Wanna Be Big Rock Stars

Before I start tonight, you're not going to hear my opinion about Obama and his speech(es) on here. Although I have been watching some of tonight's, and yes, I have my thoughts. But no, I'm not sharing them on here. I've got more important things to blog about, like tonight's efforts in helping my 5th grader with ideas for his science project.

The good thing is that the project is not due until next Thursday and he (da da dah!!) was organized enough to have it all in his accordion file and bring it out to talk about it tonight, a week early - yay! We have been working on organization this year (both Jace AND me, but that is a story for another time) and he seems to be doing pretty well with keeping up on with his schoolwork.

Now, on to the bad thing -- the project. The science teacher had a whole grid of attributes that the kids were supposed to study and identify their strengths, and then they were to choose one of four types of a project that would be best suited to their strengths. Jace is awesome in math, and also loves music and art. (Reading and writing, nah, not so much, he's not my child in that respect, I guess. AND he's good in math. Must be his dad's genes.)

So his matrix showed strengths in three key areas, and the one he picked was music. The music project is to write and record a jingle/song/rap about the subject and have an accompanying chart with the items labeled. Now, tell me, how easy do YOU think it would be to write a song about plant cells, animal cells, each of their parts and the differences between the two!?!? I mean, what rhymes with mitochondria?

But he loves music, and I was happy that he was excited about the project, and already had the song picked out - "Rockstar" by Nickelback. I mean, if he's gonna write a song, it is going to be a cool one. No lame jingles or anything (and thank god he isn't into rap. Yes, I'm showing my age). So we pull out his ipod and listen to the song, got on Lyrics.com and found the words and then discussed HOW to actually start writing the song for his project. I have to say, at this point I was a little worried, because I could see that his expectations of the project and the ACTUAL project were not going to be the same thing. He wanted something cool, and this was going to be awkward at best. Call me a pessimist if you will, but "Rockstar" and basic anatomy (well, I think the song mentions some anatomical parts, but not these) just don't go together.

But I forged ahead (all the while inwardly cringing), explaining that the first place he should probably start is with the chorus, which is played 2-3 times throughout a song, and then he can figure out the verses. We sat down and started looking at the cell parts, what each part does... chlorophyll... nucleus... vacuole -And he's got his nerdy mom, sitting there singing Nickelback and trying to give him the gist of what he will be working on. Within five minutes he decided he wants to talk to the teacher tomorrow and change his project to the visual/art one, since art was one of his other strengths on the matrix. And yes, maybe I'm a bad mom for allowing him to change, but in this case, I think it will be for the better. Nope, we're not all rock stars, even if we wanna be, and there's just no making cell parts into a cool song.