Help us with a good title and decor for 4th grade science fair project

I am a first grade teacher and I think the best title and decor will be the one that is directed by your fourth grade child :-) Seriously, please let your child take the lead on this.

I'm a teacher. Of course you have excellent intentions, but you keep referring to your daughter's 4th grade science project as something "we're" doing and you're using AskMe for her homework? Please step away from this project. Let her call it "Whye Du Aples Trn Brwn," get yourself a cocktail, and call a friend. Let her do this. Please stop saying "we."

I want to add that as a teacher there are a few reasons I'm saying to back away: * first, teachers can tell when parents have worked on an assignment. It becomes impossible to accurately assess the child's developmental arc or learning or grade them because we don't actually know what the child did and what the parent did (but confidentially we assume that the kid didn't do anything). In future years, this can result in the child being placed in either too-high or too-low level courses where they can become frustrated and begin to hate school. Imagine also that you will not be helping your kid on high-stakes testing, so the school administration and educational staff will have a demonstrable disparity between your child's testing performance, their in-class ability, and their homework ability. * second, this gives kids a subliminal message that you don't believe in their ability because you need to help with their work. Their effort will never be enough because they're not smart enough and you don't believe in them. * third, at some point you will NOT be able to help them. Perhaps taking Russian or Trig or Ubuntu. And they have not learned an appropriate skill set to get help or how to study because you always done the hard part for them. * lastly, think of all the kids whose parents didn't/couldn't help them and they're looking at your daughter's super-fancy project and now they feel like crap. Don't screw up the playing field for everyone. Don't help your kid with their projects, please.

Your job in this is to buy the apples, lemons, poster-board and markers. Then sit back and let the learning happen. Let her impress you with her mad-skillz. It's so tempting to involve yourself in the project because it's fun, and it's an activity and you hope that your daughter remembers this time fondly as a bonding moment for parents and kid. But the danger is that all of your hopes and wishes overrun the purpose of the project, which is to teach your daughter to organize her thoughts, create a display that relays those thoughts cogently and to show something of the scientific method. So go to the store, get the crap, and clear off the dining room table. Then go into the family room and watch some TV. Seriously, step away from the apple.

Nine year-olds do need help from their parents for science projects, though, especially when the teacher is telling the parents to give their kids 'guidance' as they have to do the whole thing at home. Ideally, the science teacher should have taken all the kids through the process, explaining the scientific method, hypotheses, controls and variables, how to record their observations, etc. many times, preferably through labs, before this assignment even came along. In reality, that First Big Science Project is almost always a nightmare for which everyone is not fully prepared. It is one thing for the parents to do the project themselves-- which yes, I agree, is obvious and spoils the playing field for everyone else--and quite another for them to make sure their very young child stays on task working on a major project after she has already put in a full day at school, every day for however many days (and weekends!) it takes to get this thing done. Lynnie-the-pooh, if you got your daughter to go through all the steps and accurately record all the data instead of procrastinating, throwing a fit, getting bored and wandering off or just writing down whatever sounds good so she can just be done already, jeez, you did a GREAT job and should be getting a pat on the back here instead of getting lectured. Congratulations!

XMLicious' fact is correct; bananas, apples, and tomatoes are all http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climacteric_(botany) and will speed the ripening process when the ethylene gas they offput is trapped by a container such as a brown paper bag (I use a glass cake case, myself). For the title, I favor "When Life Gives You Lemons."

One simple trick to banish brown apples for good!

How are you peeling? is the name of a feelings book that's super cute and involves fruit. Bonus points if you make faces with the apples.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmRe_fK7pbw - science and old-timey historical film appreciation, it's cross-disciplinary! Or, you could go Ingmar Bergman and use something about corruption and decay and the inevitability of death and human striving to beat back the abyss.