Namibia

Laura has officially completed her final project of the school year for her OE (gifted) class.  For this final project, each student had to research a different country (1st grade-Asia, 2nd grade-Africa, 3rd grade-South America).  Laura selected Namibia, initially because, as she put it, "it has a funky shape on the map."  She (and we) ended up learning a lot! 

Laura worked very hard on her tri-fold board.  She loves to use my scrapbooking trimmers and her favorite font on Word to make her work look nice and neat. 

It was Laura's idea to make pockets on the middle portion of her board.  For each pocket, she hand wrote an index card with the information on that topic.  For this project, Laura learned about the geography, languages, sports, food, currency, flag, transportation and landmarks of Namibia. 

The kids were also encouraged to add an extra feature to make their projects stand out.  Laura decided she wanted to make mealie pap, a traditional cornmeal dish.  We found a recipe online (supposedly based on the mealie pap served at the Tusker House restaurant at Disney's Animal Kingdom).  This evening, she, Cliff and I worked together to make a big pot of mealie pap.  She is very excited to share it with her classmates tomorrow.  We are also planning on taking some to tomorrow night's OE showcase to accompany her project that will be on display in the lunch room prior to the PTA meeting.  Oh, and by the way, the mealie pap is really good!

A big pot of mealie pap!

So, all in all this year (her first year in OE), Laura got to research and learn about honey bees, Lyndon B. Johnson, Harriet Tubman and Namibia.  Through all of this, she has developed pretty good skills at using the computer to research online, find pictures through Google images, and type and save Word documents.  She's also gotten good practice at speaking in front of her class.  We are grateful for her OE teacher, Mrs. Perdue (who, incidentally, just won the Teacher of the Year award for the entire school district this evening) for pushing the kids to learn about a variety of things.  She has also gotten the kids involved in a number of service projects, including collecting items for and packing care packages for soldiers overseas, collecting canned goods for a food drive, collecting old shoes for the Soles 4 Souls program and collecting spare change to budget and purchase school supplies for less fortunate kids in Haiti.

On another note, Cliff caught this moment on Saturday afternoon:

Reading together on the couch and munching on popcorn.

To be clear, in this picture, Laura isn't just reading to her brother.  She and Nathan were taking turns reading to each other from his Cars book anthology.  I'm glad Cliff grabbed the camera for this one!

Gina