Most days life here is filled with the usual business of life – make breakfast, struggle to get out the door, work, pick up tired kids, play, make/eat supper, bath, go to bed. Repeat. Thankfully, now that we are on campus this is fairly doable and surrounded by lovely people. We intentionally try to minimize any extra things that require too much effort, especially on the weekends.
But when someone comes and asks you to lead a little group of Lego builders and you want your son to have all the opportunities and to extend his creative building skills, you say yes. We started a group with 2 other campus kids, Tate and Jack to be the Junior Lego League Discovery Team. Our challenge was to use Duplo blocks to build a space station on the moon.
We met together three Saturdays and planned out our build. They are all lovely kids with great ideas, it’s just hard to get them to be somewhat realistic and listen to each other. Jack was definitely the quiet one in the group and was happy to build the rocket ship according to the picture. Not exactly the extended creativity I was hoping he would gain. Small steps. Tate watched and helped us find the pieces we needed, especially for the walls.
They came up with some good ideas – in space there’s no food, oxygen or houses so we needed to create all that. Our space station had a bedroom – with bunk beds because they would take up less space, a bathroom – cause you don’t want to pee in your space suit, a kitchen – with a table, stove, fridge and giant cupcake on the table and a office – to communicate with earth. There was also a rover vehicle that had to continually grow because they wanted to make sure all the people they found in the box had a place to sit.
Yesterday was the competition for all the older students in Morocco. Our group was just there to present their work. We made a display board to go with our station. The kids drew their names, some space pictures and I used one of Tate’s scribbles to look like a planet. I should’ve made their names smaller and more information about space, but live and learn.
We went with another family, taking all our kids to celebrate what the siblings had done. We quickly questioned what we were doing, making an extra trip to a new place on our usual quiet Saturday afternoon. Of course, we couldn’t find the place and had to take a few detours. Poor Ava threw up in the other vehicle all over her car seat. Awesome.
The event was held at a very impressive college that we’d never seen before so that was interesting. But watching a room full of kids running and screaming, many unsupervised while they waited for their event was more than this teacher could take. It was a bit too loud and crazy for me. Thankfully, Emmy (our school Lego genius) realized this and brought the kids display into a quiet room so the judges could ask them some questions. Jack was very nervous going in and didn’t say much. Thankfully, his two female team members have no trouble coming up with something to say! Tate was also quite animated and wanted to get his two sense in. I was proud of them for how they answered the questions clearly and showed what they had done. It was very cute. A good prep for future events, I hope.
Then they were able to check out the competition between the other schools and their robots. I don’t totally understand it all but Jack thought it was very cool.
Emmy asked the organizers to have a little recognition and presentation to our kids earlier since we knew we were going to be able to wait much longer. Little brothers and sisters were melting down. They kindly brought us into the empty amphitheatre and made a little medal presentation to each of the builders. There was even a team trophy. Now we are arguing over who gets to bring it to their class first.
All in all it was a good experience and I’m glad we did it. But I feel like I ran a marathon and now I need a nap!
unruhadventures 