Today was Honeybun’s Field Day at school. The event was scheduled for 8:15 am and as we all piled out the door to head over to drop her for school, it began raining. Turns out a strong line of storms was moving through so I sent hubby to see if Field Day was still happening before we took the little ones out in the rain. The school informed hubby that the event was being postponed and to call around 9:00 to see if they would be starting at 10:00 instead.
I called at 9:00 and a very abrupt secretary informed me the event was rescheduled for noon. So hubby decided to work from home for the day so he could still attend and I took care of some errands, before we had lunch and headed over to the school. Unfortunately, I believe due to the time change, very few parents actually ended up attending. There were only two families (including us) there for Honeybun’s class and no more than 20 families all together for all 6 kindergarten classes.
I wasn’t sure what to expect as my elementary school field days involved lots of individual running and strength tests and a few partner/group tasks like the egg and spoon or relay and the only whole class event was the tug-o-war. I also remember coming home with a stack of ribbons, one for each event which I placed 1st, 2nd or 3rd (we usually went in heats of 6 and I was a really good short distance runner so got a lot of ribbons!)
I was a bit surprised that there were no individual events in Honeybun’s field day today, all the events were whole-class. Many of them each child completed the task one at a time like a relay. Each event required each child to go around a cone some distance away after or during the required task. They did a chicken carrying event, hurdles, extra-large cup stacking, wet sponge carrying and ball on plunger carrying.
I was a little surprised, though, that they announced first, second and third place after each event. I really expected it to be an event of “everyone’s a winner. All that matters is that you do your best!” While the classes that won events were not rewarded (from what I could tell), it was announced who went the quickest. Honeybun’s class did better than I expected and won two of the events, all the other events were won by another class but I think it’s because they had less students. Honeybun did admit after that she wished her class had won more events, but I’m proud that she didn’t blame the other kids for being too slow or messing up.
Some of the events were humorous to watch. More than one child lost a shoe while running and many were not pleased with having to dip the sponge in a bucket of water and run with it. I was also surprised by how many had trouble with the stacking cups (they had to make a pyramid with 3, run around cone then stack the cups back down). Many of the children placed all 3 in a line on the ground then tried to put one on top but there were a few that took quite a while to figure out how to make the stacked pyramid.
These are the kids of memories I cherish from my school years and I wish Honeybun got to spend more time doing these kinds of activities and less on purely academic tasks (stay tuned for more on that tomorrow…)
