My K-8 school had their last day of school last week, as did many other places! I think it was worth being a kid just for those days!
It usually started with Field Day. It was a fun frenzy, whether you were the red team or the blue team. There were T-shirts for sale each year, which were always a fun souvenir. And you'd keep rotating stations all morning. Would the next one be the sack race, the bubble station (no points for your team were earned here, but fun), Noah's Ark (tossing rubber animals into milk crates), or the one where you'd kneel on a scooter using only rubber plungers to propel you forward (much harder than it looked!), or the one where you'd balance a ball on rubber plungers to the finish line and back? Another infamous game had us put on big rubber tubes and chase a ball to the finish line and back in a relay race---but not being able to see your feet made it very tough.
In my first few years we did a whole-school tug of war. (We were a Quaker school; maybe the implication of violence was too much for them, haha). That was fun, but then the dreaded event came: the fifty-yard dash. Each grade raced across the field for bragging rights. I was almost always last. Someone should have told me that it wasn't required. But in grade school, so many people participated that I didn't think otherwise.
When we were in 8th grade, we'd also be paired up with a kindergarten "buddy" helping them through the games. I thought it sounded intimidating, but Hannah liked me just great, just like my own buddy did when I was in kindergarten (who was also named Hannah).
Finally the winner would be announced, and then we'd head to our classrooms for pizza, chips, and Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies. And the best of all...yearbooks. That was always fun. Then in the afternoon, a juggling troupe would perform. One year it was some lamey folk singers.
FYI...our yearbooks were pretty crappy. Class individual photos, eights grade profiles they made themselves, lots of pictures of the 6th-8th graders, faculty photos, and group sports pictures with little to no action shots, etc. The bare minimum. But we loved them anyway. In high school, we got better yearbooks. We also had our own field day, called Fox Day, but it wasn't the same. AM was a scavenger hunt; PM was games--you usually only got to play 1 or 2. That was also followed by a company that came in and led a game show.
Another exciting thing to do was enjoy literary magazines. Often around this time, teachers would compile some of our writing projects from the past year, make them into books, and hand them out. I always loved those, being a writer myself.
Of course, in middle school there was the graduation dance a few days before. Sometimes the graduating class would attempt making a big circle and swaying to Vitamin C's "Graduation." When we tried it, it dissolved in 30 seconds. Oh well.
Then, the last day itself! Activities varied over the years. Sometimes we'd clean the classroom and fight over who got to bring the job chart home. One year we had Wendy's for lunch. In 3rd through 5th grade, we got to walk over to the neighboring high school pool and go for a swim. Me being raised by safety-conscious parents, I got so freaked out by a nearby storm that I got out of the pool after ten minutes and refused to go back in, being all "but Ranger Rick magazine says it's bad to swim near a storm!" Le sigh. In the younger years, we'd have a "sing out," where we'd go to the gym and sing a bunch of folk songs from the sixties. That sounds incredibly lame, and it pretty much was.
And then, you'd look around your classroom, your combination of classmates, and remember all the memories, and realize that this teacher and class would never be yours again. So it was exciting, but also sad. Walking by your old classroom the next year was a punch in the gut. But then soon enough your new class would feel like a new home...and the cycle continued...
