About a month ago Link came home from school with an eraser. This in itself is not unusual because pencils and erasers are common implements in an elementary school. The eraser itself wasn’t unusual either. It was just one of those wedge-shaped pencil top erasers. But Link displayed it for me like he’d won a grand prize. By “displayed” I mean “shoved in my face about two inches from my eyeballs.” After moving the eraser to a distance where I could see something other than a large blur, I was able to see why Link was so excited. He’d drawn a little face on the eraser. Link was very pleased with his little eraser man. As soon as we got home, Link combed the house for more erasers so he could draw faces on them as well. I figured this was a harmless activity, so I let him do it.
A few days later Link was with me in Staples and he saw a whole pack of brand new erasers in various colors. He used some of his money to buy the erasers. Upon our arrival at home, these too acquired faces. They joined their brethren in a little jar. Several times Link pulled these erasers out to use as part of his elaborate games. he discovered that they fit almost perfectly over the circular knobs of Duplo blocks. This was incredibly cool because Link uses Duplos as game boards all the time. I still didn’t pay much attention to the erasers.
Then one day, during homework time, I realized what an asset these little eraser buddies could be. Link had a spelling worksheet. It was one of those with several columns of words in one corner and the rest of the page is filled with tasks to accomplish using the provided words. Words are not Link’s friends. This kind of sheet can be miserable for us both. But on this day he had selected three eraser buddies. They stood on the columns of words. As the words were used and crossed off, the little eraser people could move forward. Link was busy trying to see which eraser would finish his column first. Naturally there were sound effects involved. I listened for a moment. Apparently the words did not just get crossed off, they exploded. And the eraser people had all been christened with Link’s name and the names of a couple of his friends. My son found a way to play with friends while doing his homework.
The next day Link had a math paper. It was just rows of problems to accomplish. He ran for his erasers. I expected him to take the column approach, but that was not complex enough. He drew a game board that wended its way down the paper. Each math problem had its own square. Then Link got a dice and began to play. As the erasers passed over the math problems, they had to complete them. I listened to Link cheer when one of his friends got stuck doing a problem. I heard sounds of dismay when the Link eraser had to do one. Not only were Link’s friends playing with him at homework time, now he had them doing the work too.
Obviously this kind of solution won’t work in school. It is not efficient. One math paper can take 90 minutes because of all the drawing and then the embellishments that the game inevitably picks up. It is also noisy. There is cheering. There are explosions. There are cries of dismay. Sometimes there are engine noises. At the end of the game, the paper has picked up so many extraneous pictures, that the answers are hard to read. I wonder what his teacher thinks about these papers. Can he see the enormous creative energy that Link pours into these games? But as for me, I love the little eraser buddies. They make homework time a happy place.
Clever. 🙂 You’ll be glad you wrote this down. Link is pretty smart! And my daughter will love the idea of making eraser buddies. 🙂
FABULOUS!!!!
That’s fantastic. I’m reminded of his Mario Party party, too… I was much the same way, actually. I didn’t need to explicitly make it into a board game, but I always found tasks easier if I found some way of charting my progress along the way. Usually I’d make checklists, where each little check box actually fit together into a bigger box, which represented all the chores I had to do that weekend.
I’m not a parent, but I was an overly “creative” child when it came to doing my homework, for various reasons. If I might make a very small suggestion that may help prevent an issue down the road?
Contact his teacher(s). You don’t have to explain the entire “eraser buddy” game board concept to them if you don’t want to. But as someone who used to help my wife grade papers when she was teaching, I know that the more difficult it is to read someone’s paper, the more irritable I became while grading. Doodles and things like that drove me crazy. However, if I had known that a particular student’s doodles were his way of generating interest in the work, not only would I have been calmed by the information, I would have actually been a little impressed — even excited — that a student was finding a way to embrace their work. Heck, if I’d been the actual teacher, I might have even been inspired to come up with a game-based project for a class or two.
Obviously, I’d be especially happy if their interest translated into success. If I got a game-board covered paper with horrible answers, I’d be disappointed and feel that the doodles were serving as a distraction. But if the quality of the work didn’t suffer, I’d be fine with the doodles as long as I understood why they were there. If I didn’t know, I’d just assume that the student was showing a lack of respect by “defacing” his work. (It’s a horrible assumption to make, but an easy one.)
(As always, your mileage may vary.)
Maybe Link could be convinced to do his board game on a second sheet of paper, right next to his homework page, to keep his homework neat, and this way he can keep the board game for future use.
But it’s a brilliant way to do homework!
Wow. That is so cool.