Life with Liz: School projects not for the squeamish

I have a love/hate relationship with school projects. I love the fact that they usually allow my kids to dig deeper into something that they’re really interested in. I hate the fact that all the initial enthusiasm they have when picking a project topic dissipates about 30 seconds after they announce that they have a project and I spend the duration of the preparation period fighting with them to get the project finished.

I will confess to helping with a few projects more than I should have over the year, not in an effort to get a better grade for my child, but to avoid hot gluing the entire thing to their forehead as penance for making me crazy.

Luckily for me, most of the kids’ projects deal with either science or history, my two favorite subjects. I also think that these two subjects are best learned through hands-on experience. Walking the Freedom Trail in Boston, or touring the battlefields at Gettysburg, or sleeping overnight on the Battleship New Jersey are great ways to experience and remember history.

Everything in our house, from cooking dinner to scrubbing stains out of baseball pants is a new opportunity for a science experiment. Kids have such a natural curiosity about everything and conning them into a household chore under the guise of science is a no-brainer for me.

The best part of our at-home projects is that they don’t have to write up a report or put together a story board, and this is frequently the most difficult part of getting a project over the finish line for my kids. So, when G came home last week and announced that he needed a poster board for his science project, I wasn’t exactly thrilled. I asked him to put together a list of things he needed and then asked to see what the exact parameters of the project were.

Lo and behold, the third item on the list was an animal heart. Yep, my kid chooses to dissect a heart for science class, and the thing he tells me that I need to get him is a poster board. I asked him where exactly he thought I was going to get an animal heart at 6 p.m. on a Wednesday. His response? Call around to a butcher shop!

While we do have a few local butchers, I imagined the other 20-some kids in his class calling in similar requests.

“Oh no, Mom, I’m the only one who is dissecting a heart!” Wait a minute, he had a choice in this project and THIS is what he picked? Just great.

In my project-induced panic, I momentarily forgot who else lived in the house. When the Wonderful Husband, or in this case Wonderful Hunter, got home from work and I hit him with “your son needs a heart to dissect,” he responded that he’d call around and he was sure someone we knew had a deer heart in the freezer. Sure enough, Uncle J came through for us and had one from a deer he harvested last hunting season. G was overjoyed.

I brought the heart, which was frozen and wrapped in plastic, and put it in the fridge to thaw out. The next morning, I got my next big surprise when I opened the fridge to find that the plastic had leaked. Of course, I had stored it on the top shelf, so the blood had trickled down all over the entire rest of the fridge. Needless to say, I wasn’t hungry for breakfast anymore. The good news for G was that now his heart was completely drained of any fluids.

G couldn’t wait to dive right into the dissection, and I let him and the WH bond over slicing and dicing. Since G has been gutting fish for years and gutted his own deer (with some help from the WH) last fall, I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised at how deft he was with the knife. He did an excellent job separating the heart and finding all of the basic heart parts.

He and the WH also captured some photographs, which I worried would be the next hurdle to overcome. I uploaded them to Walmart’s 1-hour photo lab, and waited to get a phone call from a very upset photo technician. Instead, I got a text in an hour that my photos were ready to pick up. The poor clerk though, who wanted to verify that I received all my photos … she had a little bit of an unpleasant surprise when she flipped through them.

Now, we were at the critical juncture: The creation of the presentation. I fully expected his interest in the project to wane quickly. To my surprise, though, he couldn’t wait to lay everything out and quickly developed a list of labels for me to print out to attach to the pictures. We also spent some time sounding out and practicing the “big” heart words like mitral valve, aortic arch, and pericardium. I’m also going to consider this G’s first Latin lesson as we discussed how many different parts of the body have “septa.” (Not septums!)

I love that G has had this opportunity. I’m grateful that this got to be a project that we worked on together. While I work in the science field, it’s been a long time since I really got my hands dirty with a science project of this magnitude, and it was fun to “mess around.” I think I might call around to see if our friends have any more frozen body parts we can chop up.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.