Carter's Science Fair

I only recall doing science fair once as a kid. I grew bean plants and subjected them to various forms of music. I still recall that Jazz was their favourite. I was hoping that Carter would do Science Fair last year since they traditionally open it up for grade four students, however his teachers decided that Grade 4 is 'not mature enough'. Not sure I agree with that. Carter and I disagreed so profusely that we did our own science fair last year. We used various kinds of solvents to melt things. Our favourite was lego and styrofoam in acetone.

I was hoping for a better decision from his teacher this year and I was initially disappointed. Carter came home with the task of selecting an experiment that he could do in 90 minutes at school. Initially I thought this was just a practice for his real science fair project but we both soon learned that science fair was in a mere two weeks and what we chose was his project. This mean no time to grow plants or anything that took any amount of time.

I say initially disappointed because as it turned out Carter was definitely able to make the best of an undesired situation. He picked a fairly interesting topic and his teachers were quite impressed with his scientific approach to selecting an eco-friendly laundry detergent. His presentation was excellent and his experiment was very sound. He did the vast majority of the work on his own at school and when it came time for judging at the school science fair he managed to get top 5 for the school. The judges were very impressed with how well he presented his findings, both visually and verbally. Top 5 meant he got to go to the district science fair and once again his judges were impressed with how well he spoke. They don't award winners and instead everyone gets either gold, silver or bronze. He managed to come away with a Gold!!! Just to be on the safe side we're already thinking about projects for next year. We will have plenty of time to do something interesting.