The Mast-Head: School Projects

This week, amid juggling pre-election stories, it has been project time in the Rattray household. Evvy, our sixth grader, volunteered to make one of the party games for a school Halloween party, and so, after spending Tuesday trying to make sense of campaign finance reports, I raced home with a slab of builder’s blue foam.

We were to have started on the project Monday evening, but Evvy got the green light to go with her grandfather to see the pumpkins at the Bridgehampton Lions Club contest then get dinner. Instead, we set to it a day late. Truth was, her celebration was not for a couple of days, but she said it was due early.

She is calling the game Poke the Ghosts and Pumpkins, and, as best I understand it, kids in the lower grades at her school will choose from among a grid of 50 paper-covered

plastic cups, each ripping through one to discover a prize. Other sixth graders are filling the cups and capping them; our part is making a large foam grid to hold it all.

As I write, I am waiting for her to get out of bed to see about painting it. After spending about two hours the night before helping her mark out lines on the foam and then cut 50 holes with a drywall saw, the enclosed porch where we went at it was filled with tiny pieces of blue debris. Ellis, our 5-year-old, who lost a first tooth later that night, took each of the leftover circles of foam and assembled them into a rectangle by the front door. It was an “app,” he said, as in something one would use on an iPhone.

One of the pleasures, if hectic after a long day, of being a parent is helping with school projects. Of course, the eternal question is how much to do and how much to leave to the child. Evvy, to her credit, sawed at the foam board until her arm got tired. I took over then and finished up. And Ellis never stopped taking the pieces for his app.

Then I vacuumed. And I’ll probably end up driving the thing to school. That will be part of the project, too.