Popcornasaurus

Sorry this is such a long post, but it's a story that I want to remember about Jonah's first real at-home school project :  )

Jonah's class has been doing a unit on dinosaurs these past few weeks! As part of the unit, he had to complete a dinosaur project at home. It consisted of creating a dinosaur model made out of some kind of material and covered in the item of his choice.

PLAN A

As soon as he brought the letter home, he was adamant about using marshmallows for the project. So, we went to the store, bought three large bags of colored marshmallows, lots of toothpicks, and tacky glue. I left it up to Randy to get the foam to mold the dinosaur shape. Well, apparently Randy and I had different ideas about how this dinosaur project was to go down. My idea was to cut the shape from foam and use toothpicks to cover the surface in marshmallows. Randy's idea was to use the foam as a stand and build the dino out of toothpicks and marshmallows. Let's just say I won that battle ; ) So Jonah and I sat for approx. 2 hours covering the area of the shapes in marshmallows. Our plan was to piece the foam together the next night to create a large dinosaur and then we'd mount it on a board. Well, that's when things took an unexpected turn!  We get a note home, the night before the project is due, that says, "Your child must be able to carry this dinosaur on his own without assistance!" This was never stated in the original project description and if I weren't so exhausted from gluing 500 marshmallows the night before I might have argued that point to his teacher. There was no way Jonah was going to be able to haul this ginormous dino on his own. So Randy and I got to brainstorming again! We tried cutting the original one down, but it just mangled the marshmallows and made it look like a T-Rex had gotten a hold of it.  All the while, my parents keep calling ready to zip over to save us from this dino disaster.  I'm pretty sure my dad had his boots on and his truck fired up ready to roll.  My dad is the king of school projects! He spent many a late night constructing whole towns from mere scraps of wood and, as Linds reminded me, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria out of toothpicks and popsicle sticks, no joke!   I now know how he felt!  I reassured them we had it under control, well kind of, lol.  So onto...

PLAN B

Randy goes back to Michael's, buys more styrofoam (mind you, we've probably just spent $20 in styrofoam on these 2 dinos), we cut it out in the shape of a brontosaurus and proceed to glue popped popcorn all over the thing. We had tacky glue  and hot glue strings everywhere! The important thing is that Jonah was having so much fun! We kind of turned it into a dino party. And the best part was that we could snack on the materials as we were assembling, lol. I'm proud to say he (or should I say we) scored a 10 out of 10 ; ) He was so proud of his dino!  And I present to you...

POPCORNASAURUS!