School Girl decided to enter the school science fair this year. For kids in grades K-2 (yes, really), the project isn’t as important as the thought behind the project. Teaching children about the scientific method is more important. Which struck me as a wonderful thing, and a good reason to encourage her to do this in the first place.

We got a late-ish start on things. She did an experiment with plants. We found out a number of things: what will and won’t work for germination (and the fact that 1-year-old seed will germinate at all was huge for some of us), that cactus “soil” isn’t necessarily soil – not like potting or garden soil, and that measuring plant height per day would have been a great idea.

The poster for the project was fairly easy to complete. At least compared to the rest of the project…We handed it in to the committee this morning. I think School Girl will be interviewed by the judges either this morning or tomorrow morning. She’s a little nervous, but excited about it too. She’s even more excited about the party later on this week, and Family Night after that.

The actual scientists in our family had a collective panic attack when told about the school science fair. “Isn’t she too young for that?” was a common theme. Looking back, though, our school never did have a science fair. Either we were too young back then (there was a big science fair, but only open to high school students) or the school just…didn’t have one. So if she’s still interested at all, I see nothing wrong with doing this again next year. Maybe not with plants next time.