For context, I saw pictures of all of his classmates projects. There was a poster with 100 butterflies. There was a picture of a tree with 100 apples. There was a list of "100 wishes for the world" which was CLEARLY made by the child's mother, because the handwriting was better than mine, and I'm pretty sure this 6-year old didn't come up with "Prescriptions are affordable", "Refugees are welcome," and "Gender fluidity is accepted." Like, at least try to pretend that your kid did the assignment herself.
Chad's idea was to build an igloo out of 100 marshmallows. I don't even know where he learned about igloos. I think his project took about ten times longer than most of the other projects. Do you know what 100 marshmallows look like? Well, I didn't, which is why I naively bought two big bags of them and then we counted out a handful and I now have 1.75 bags of marshmallows left over. We let them get stale over night, then we let the kids feel how hard they got when they got stale, and then Natalie ate one of our 100, and since you can't skimp on your 100 marshmallow igloo, it's damn lucky I had an extra 600 in the cupboard.
Our igloo was constructed with lots of glue, but no blueprints, which is why we ended up making an extra row on the bottom at the end. Our estimation on its size was pretty close- we only had two marshmallows left over, which we used for pillars at the entrance. We also learned lots of fun facts about igloos. I won't spoil your research fun, in case you want to do this project on your own, but an igloo can be made very fast, and can be surprisingly temperate inside. And you want your igloo to melt a little while you are inside.
Once we finished the igloo, we needed to focus on location, location, location. Lucky for Chad, I had just bought new shoes, so it was our first diorama! He decorated the background with cotton ball clouds, glitter snow, a moon and a hand drawn "snow owl". We then Googled images of a penguin, polar bear and arctic fox, and spent quite a bit of time watching an arctic fox face-planting over and over again on YouTube. You should watch that. Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EiV-ERKRRs
The final creation was this:
We couldn't find any last minute 100-year-old man costumes for Chad, so we put him in a Hawaiian shirt and told him to tell people he was retired. He got confused and told the class he was "rented" which means you have no job. His teacher figured it out. During his presentation, he also threw Natalie under the bus and told everyone that she had eaten one of his marshmallows.
The look was completed with baby powder in his hair, some old sunglasses with the lenses popped out, and costume make-up of wrinkles, a beard and chest hair.
Sadly, for all our effort, Chad's was one of two displays that isn't hanging up for the whole school to see. They decided the marshmallows would attract mice. :( His friend who made a display of 100 Lego figurines also had to take his home so they wouldn't get stolen lost. Here's a fun fact: I was talking to that mom at a birthday party this past weekend and she admitted that they somehow forgot to do the project over the weekend, remembered Monday morning and Lego men were the first thing they could think of that they had 100 of already in the house. #secondchildsyndrome. Luckily, we know that in a few years, Natalie will still have 100 hairbows to stick to a piece of construction paper, and Theo will have collected 100 Hexbugs rattling around the living room at night. (True story: we all heard a suspicious noise during dinner, I jumped up because it sounded like Natalie was having a potty-related accident, then a Hexbug came scurrying out behind my chair. And Theo says, very conversationally, "Oh! Bug! Where did you come from?")
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