Hollace amazing me with the level of detail of one of her projects.
Creature club has been around for awhile but didn’t really take off like it has until recently. I suppose on one level this has been inspired by Pokemon but I think the “creatures” have been part of a made up game she has played with kids before she got into Pokemon.
To me it seemed to really take off when I bought some half size index cards from Office Depot that was going out of business. I gave them to Hollace and she promptly started making data cards of all the creatures–a picture on one side and data about that creature on the other. She loved making up new creatures and encouraged those in the club to make some up too.
[Ok, I just had a deja vu moment. A couple years ago when they started throwing around the term Aspergers, I read about some famous people who had this. One was the creator of Pokemon. I then looked up his story and the way he started Pokemon is eerily similar to how Hollace is approaching this CC]
Anyway, Hollace started the club and officially signed up a few kids in class. Before long she had about 30 kids all wanted to be in the club both in school and on the bus. She wrote out this quiz to test people’s knowledge of creatures. It had really well thought out questions, some multiple choice and two essay questions. She wanted me to make 30 copies. She also wanted some folders so she could make personal files of the members.
On the home front, she started teaching me classes of creatures. I had 4 long sessions where I took pages of notes. There were not only different types of creatures but their different environment. I wish I could find my notes of them to share here but I was amazed at the level of detail and how organized Hollace was in her teaching of these creatures.
We finally got a note home from the teacher telling us that Creature Club was starting to impact the class. Apparently everyone was into it.
For a couple of weeks Hollace shifted focus by then creating her spork kitties.
Every day at lunch Hollace would collect everyone’s unused sporks to create two gangs of spork kitties, the house cats and the alley cats.
I had this circle puncher and Hollace decided that that with yellow constuction paper, it looked like coins so off she was making creature coins. CC was back.
All of a sudden CC was a commerce thing with all the kids trading CC coins for stuff. Hollace started coming home with cool little trinkets that she bought from other kids in the CC store.
Right before Spring Break however Hollace caught a couple kids counterfitting CC coins and was ready to shut down operations, she was mad. They said they were just trying to help but she didn’t like it. She said, you can so tell they were fake coins cause they cut them out freehand.
When school came back after break, the kids were so excited the CC store was back. One girl apparently dropped to the floor and hugged Hollace’s feet in excitement!
Today Hollace is ready to quit the CC because of how the kids only care about the store part and not the actual creatures.
On Friday I found a list in her folder called “Hollace’s Hatelist”
- U.S.A (I have to ask her again what this one means, obviously not too ominous or I would remember)
- Home work (common fact)
- Creature Club
- Eryn… (she erased the kid’s name here)
- Koalas (lately she has told me several times her dislike of koalas so I am not surprised to see it here)
- Math (another common fact except when asked, she realized she should of put spelling on this list)
While Hollace is a little heart broken over the commercialization of Creature Club, she hasn’t given up on the real gist of it. Today we went out and bought some fabric. She wants to learn how to sew so she can make a Creature plushie!