Rose's class has spent the last two months putting together a project about a European country. Every pair of kids got their own country. Rose and M. had Belgium.

I only hated one of the assignments--finding photos of their country. They had to come up with fifteen photos on set categories. Since I don't let Rose touch my computer let alone set her free on the internet, I had to basically do this portion of the assignment for her. After much hunting, I would find a picture of a river in Belgium, and she would decide if she liked it enough to include. Then I had to relable all the photos and get them ready for John to deal with the printing out. Beside the assumptions of class privilege (correct in our case) that we had a computer, internet access, and a color printer at home, the assignment was not fourth grade friendly. We all know how I feel about homework in general (Just say no); I feel even worse about poorly designed homework.

But, the rest of the project was great. They put together costumes from clothes around the house, made a treat (John's job to help on that one, so I have no objections), made related crafts, a flag, a timeline, a history, playing cards of the principal exports, and prepared a presentation.

They set up poster boards on their desks, and all the other classes, along with parents, got to tour Europe. Who knew there was a country named Andorra? (Ok, all my readers but me knew. But I learned something.) My favorite part was when Rose told us a significant moment in Belgium's history was 1317 when the Jews were expelled. Hmm, I'm not sure every Belgian would have had that same answer.

The cookies she made were great.