What To Do When Your Kid Thinks Their School Project Is Dumb: Tips For Open-Ended Assignments Like Create Your Own Kingdom
The crinkle of a crumpled worksheet hit the kitchen table right after Jax slammed his backpack down, half a bag of cheddar Goldfish spilling onto the sticky juice ring left from his after-school lemonade. “Need help with my dumb ‘create your own kingdom’ school project,” he mumbled, dropping into a chair and crossing his arms.
I was folding the third load of laundry that week, so I just nodded and pulled the worksheet toward me. It was a 5th grade social studies end-of-unit project for their medieval civilizations block: name your kingdom, draw a detailed map, write three core laws, explain your system of government, and list five facts about your kingdom’s geography and natural resources. It sounded like the kind of fun, creative project teachers love to assign. To Jax, it was dumb.
My first instinct was the same as it always is with these things: throw out a silly, low-stakes idea to get him excited. “What about a taco kingdom? You love tacos. The capital could be Guac City.” He just glared, eyes narrowed, and said “Everyone in my class is doing a food kingdom. It’s stupid. None of it is real.”
That’s when I stopped pushing the silly idea. I’ve known Jax for 11 years, and when he calls something “dumb” it almost never means he’s just being lazy. It means he’s stuck. He’s the kid who still double-checks his math homework three times because he hates getting answers wrong, and open-ended projects with no right answer make his skin crawl. Making up an entire fake world from scratch felt pointless to him, like wasting time on something that didn’t matter.
I leaned back against the counter and thought for a minute. Three weekends before, we’d spent all Saturday hiking our favorite trail up at the national forest, the one with the abandoned granite quarry, the wild blueberry patches that line the upper path, and the beaver pond Jax always stops to stare at. He’d spent 20 minutes that day ranting about a guy who’d brought an ATV off the main road and torn up a whole patch of ferns, and about how people pick every last blueberry so there’s none left for anyone who comes after. I asked him, “What if your kingdom is that trail?”
He blinked. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, it’s already got all the parts you need. You don’t have to make anything up. You just get to be king of it. All you have to do is write down what’s already there, and make the rules you already wish people followed.”
That unclenched his shoulders faster than any silly pizza kingdom idea ever had. We pulled up the photos he’d taken on that hike on his phone, and he got a big piece of poster board for the map. Instead of drawing fake mountains and fake rivers, he traced the outline of the trail from the park map we had in the car, labeled the quarry as his kingdom’s main stone source for building, the blueberry patches as his royal farms, the beaver pond as the protected water reserve, and the old ranger cabin as his castle. Five geography facts were done in five minutes: 8 inches of rain a year, mostly granite bedrock, 12 kinds of native fern, wild blueberries as the main crop, beaver ponds as the main freshwater source.
When he got to the laws, he didn’t even need help. The three he wrote down were exactly the things he’d ranted about on that hike: 1) All waste, including food scraps, must be carried out to avoid attracting bears and littering. 2) No visitor may pick more than one pint of blueberries, to leave enough for wildlife and other visitors. 3) No motorized vehicles are allowed off the main access road, to protect native plant beds and animal dens. His system of government? A council of hikers and biologists that votes on new rules, because he didn’t want to be a tyrant king. He added a flag: a blueberry on a green background, with a tiny beaver in the corner that my 7-year-old daughter drew when she wandered over to help. He complained about it being messy, but he left it on there.
What I’ve learned from these moments is that most of the time, when kids write off a project as dumb, the problem isn’t the project – it’s that the blank page feels too big. Open-ended assignments are supposed to encourage creativity, but for kids who are used to clear right and wrong answers, a blank prompt can feel like a trick. The trick that works for us isn’t to force fun or do the work for them. It’s to help them root the project in something they already care about, instead of asking them to invent something out of thin air.
The three questions I now use for any open-ended project like this are concrete, and they take two minutes to work through: First, what’s a place you know well that has different parts (like a park, your neighborhood, your grandma’s farm)? Second, what’s one rule you wish people followed there that they don’t? Third, what’s one thing that place has a lot of that people need. Nine times out of ten, that gives a kid all the starting material they need to stop complaining and start working. It cuts the overwhelm way down, because they’re not starting from zero. You don’t need any fancy supplies or extra prep to walk them through those three questions, and it works for everything from kingdom projects to “create your own business” assignments to book reports that let you pick your own format.
Jax got his project back last week. He got a B+, and his teacher wrote a note saying she loved that he based it on a place he actually visits. A couple of his classmates did tease him that it wasn’t a “real” made-up kingdom, but he just shrugged. He didn’t care that much. Last weekend, when we were back on that trail, he stopped at the beaver pond and kicked a loose rock off the path, and said “Gotta keep my kingdom in shape, you know.”
It was a dumb little project, in the end, but it turned into something he actually cared about. We still have nights where we’re gluing construction paper at 9pm and everyone’s cranky, and there are still assignments that feel so arbitrary even my three questions can’t fix them. But this little trick works more often than not. It doesn’t fix every bad school assignment, but it makes them a little less dumb.
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