Field Day

I am planning this year's Field Day, a becoming-tradition at my school. Last year, we split the kids up into teams and tore a bunch of strips out of cheap cotton, a different color for each team, to be worn as armbands or ninja-style headbands. We played three-legged race, water balloon toss, egg-in-spoon relay, and that game where you join hands with two different people and then the whole group has to untwist into a circle without anyone letting go. One family came and brought watermelon for the whole school. It was fun, although as one of the main organizers, some of the downsides stick out in my memory, like the glass we found embedded in the ground, which put an end to games like the crab walk or the wheelbarrow relay.

Here are the activities planned for this year:

• Team Cheer - Each team creates a cheer & simple choreography to go with it. Points awarded for originality, coordination, catchiness, choreography, and enthusiasm. I am considering having the teachers come up with a cheer ahead of time to perform as a model...
  
• Human Knot - I remembered the name of that hand-linking untangling thing described above.
  
• Dizzy Bats Relay - Not for the faint of stomach... Funny as heck to watch, though!
  
• Three-legged Race
  
• Wheelbarrow Race - If we can find a patch of glass-free ground.
  
• Water Balloon Toss - Pairs of students toss water balloons back and forth, taking a step farther apart after each successful catch. Ends with a splash!
  
• Tug O'War - I'm requiring that each team be gender-balanced.
  
• Capture the Flag - Fun for the whole school!

There will, of course, be points awarded for sportsmanship.

For two summers during college, I was a camp counselor for IAAY - the Institute for the Academic Advancement of Youth - at one of their academic summer programs for kids. My 5th and 6th graders took one intensive class during the morning and early afternoon, while we, their RA's, planned active and/or relaxing activities for their afternoons and evenings. One of my fellow RA's thought up Pasta Challenge, an idea which I borrowed for an afterschool program last year; it's basically building stuff out of pasta and seeing how much weight it can support. We played a dozen versions of tag, read books together, played drama games, board games, and Chess, made friendship bracelets and pins, played touch footballa nd ultimate frisbee (and just how many sports include an adjective - no, a superlative! - in their names?!), took them to the pool, and thought up lots of indescribable ways to use up every last ounce of their energy before lights-out. For the evenings and weekends, we came up with whole-camp activities ranging from Capture the Flag to carnivals and trivia game shows. One weekend per session, the kids of each RA group would conspire to design a costume for Dress Your RA Night (they were given categories and help from two organizers). I walked down the catwalk (er, picnic tables) dressed as a sleepy clown and as Pippi Longstocking (something about my hair apparently said, "Pigtails!" to my charges).

It's crazy the stuff you can get away with when the kids are campers, not your full-time students, only there for three weeks, and don't go home to their parents at the end of the evening. One all-camp game involved getting marked with a (temporary) marker on your arm in order to get out of jail. We'd herd the kids into the showers after that one, but they'd still look vaguely green and orange for a couple of days...