Why a picture perfect turkey disguise won't teach your child anything useful
Or, in other words, why you shouldn't use Pinterest to help with homework
For me, it's not the overuse of pumpkin-spice, or the leaves falling to the ground, or the Christmas music on the radio that makes it really start to feel like fall. It doesn't really feel like it's officially fall and the start of the holiday season until disguised turkeys start popping up all over my social media feeds. If you're nodding your head in agreement, then I'm guessing you also have a child in elementary school, and are perhaps in the middle of your own round of "turkey trouble."
My family's turkey trouble began the day my son's class read Turkey Trouble by Wendi Silvano. Like many other students in schools across the country, my son's teacher gave him a black and white outline of a turkey and instructions to disguise it however he wanted.
Cute, right?
I asked my son what he wanted to disguise his turkey as and he looked at me and said, "I don't know." I prodded further. "Maybe a chicken?" he said before running off to play outside.
Now some children jump at the chance to do a project like this. My son is not one of those children. He will happily work for hours on a Magnatile invention, but if you ask him to do a craft project, at best he'll squirt a drop of glue and make a few scribbles and call it a day. So this was no surprise that this wasn't going to be a project he was going to run with on his own.
Before I started trying to figure out how we could disguise a turkey as a chicken (and whether our artistic ability would allow us to convey the difference!), I sat down at the computer and typed in "turkey disguise." My screen filled with turkeys disguised as 3-D gumball machines, penguins surrounded by pompom snowballs, adorable Minions, an incredibly detailed Darth Vader, a bejeweled Elsa from Frozen, and even a bag of popcorn (with actual popcorn glued to the paper!).
I have to admit, I was impressed. Not only were the ideas clever, but the execution was flawless.
So flawless that it was hard to imagine a six-year-old (or even a ten-year-old!) being responsible for it.
I realized that I had started down the same path that many moms had traveled before me. Would I follow in their footsteps and convince my son who has never eaten a gumball before in his life that of course he wants to disguise his turkey as a gumball machine? Or would I jump on an observation he made once that "penguins are cute" and suggest that we give his turkey the tuxedo treatment? I caught myself thinking how we already had a bunch of pompoms, so gluing them on wouldn't be too hard...
But then Teacher Me raised her hand and told Mom Me to STOP RIGHT THERE. You see, Teacher Me believes above all else in the importance of child-directed learning. Teacher Me despises cookie cutter projects--that kind of assignment where you can't tell the difference between the work of twenty different children. Mom Me (who is also Perfectionist Me) said, "But we could make the best disguised turkey EVER. Just think of what the teacher will say! And the other parents!" Then Teacher Me just shook her head and reminded Mom Me of all the learning I would be depriving me son of if I followed that route, and that was enough to make Mom Me take a back seat.
So instead of turning to Pinterest, here's what we did:
Whenever possible, follow the child's interests. Engagement and motivation increase exponentially when children are interested in a task and are able to make their own choices. So I suggested that we make a list of everything my son is interested in to help us brainstorm a turkey disguise. NASA, the International Space Station, mice, computers, pandas, and robots all made the list. He looked over the list and circled robot.
Don't stifle creativity or intimidate with a perfect model. While I believe that providing examples and models can be helpful and necessary at times, this didn't seem like one of those times. I resisted the urge to search Pinterest for a robot turkey disguise (even though I'm 99.9% certain I would have found several!). Instead, I ask my son to brainstorm how he wanted his Robot Turkey to look. "Lots of wires, a controller, and a computer!" he said.
Provide opportunities for children to plan and organize. I could have artfully arranged a carefully curated selection of materials for transforming a turkey into a robot, but instead I asked my son what he thought he needed. He spent a few minutes digging through the drawer where we toss random odds and ends to be repurposed into art or inventions. He selected a small cardboard box to be the robot's body, a playdough jar lid for the head, a mason jar lid to be an on/off switch (because it made a popping sound when he pressed on it), and some pipe cleaners to be wires. Before we fired up the glue gun, I encouraged him to plan out the design by arranging the pieces on the paper. He set to work arranging and rearranging the different components. At one point he decided that it would make it look more like a robot if it was made out of metal. When he couldn't find a metal box, he settled on covering the cardboard box with aluminum foil.
Allow for revision and extension beyond the initial plan. Once we glued on the main pieces to his liking, my son questioned how the power would travel from the on/off switch to the robot body. He solved this dilemma by adding some string and drawing some wires and a control panel, and then instructed me to label the different parts ("power supply," "wires," "computer that stops short circuits"). As if Mom Me needed any more proof that Teacher Me was right in picking the non-Pinterest route, my son looked up and said, "But how will the robot get power? I know, solar panels!" He quickly set to work coloring in the turkey's wings with a black marker to be solar panels.
If we had followed Pinterest and tried to make a gumball machine turkey disguise, my son would have perhaps gotten some practice following directions and most definitely would have gotten frustrated and said how he wasn't "good at art." He would have invested at most 5 minutes in the project and taken little pride in the finished product. Instead, by letting him lead, my son gained valuable practice with planning, problem solving, flexible thinking, and goal-directed persistence--all essential executive function skills that will serve him well throughout his academic career.
Is his Robot Turkey Pinterest worthy? Well, I think so, but I might be a bit biased! It might not look quite like the other turkeys on the class bulletin board, but it is something that my son is proud of in a way he never would have been of a Gumball Machine Turkey. He even asked me to print a picture of it so he wouldn't miss it after he brought it back to school.
In my book, that's definitely a win.
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