Just chiming in to add that my DS7 also feels let down when "enrichment" activities are actually just arts/crafts tangentially related to things going on in class.
Related and unpromising - I was at our Site Council meeting yesterday, where we discussed a proposal to open a tinkering room for our elementary school. Hooray, right?
As it turns out, not so much. The mission statement included creating a place where kids could "purposefully explore and invent ..." I asked how "purposely explore and invent" differed from "explore and invent." As it turns out, the exploration and invention will be severely bounded. One example: kids studying animals will make a clay animal or cut out magazine pictures of the animal, and then cut out pictures of the appropriate habitat for it. The "exploring and inventing" was described as "ways to make the habitat stand up around the clay animal." Oh - and this was for 4th grade, not first. I can't imagine what they would consider "exploring and inventing" for first grade.
In our experience, enrichment has almost always been busy work rooted in arts and crafts. But I'm ETA that I think MegMeg's approach is brilliant and I'm going to try it!
