Today was a big day for the Steiner School. This Raft Day is an annual tradition, to celebrate summer and the start of a new school year. All the parents told me I could not miss it!
The whole school headed out at 9am to a local park on one of the bays of the South Pacific ocean. The students, class 1 thru class 7 (basically grades 1-7), were divided up into 16 teams. Each team had 1 student leader and 1 adult to 'help'. There were piles of miscellaneous building materials, floatation devices, and scraps of rope...every team was on their own to build a great floating raft. Little kids were to sit on the raft with the older kids
paddling, kicking, pulling and pushing the raft out in the bay, around an adult marking the far end, and then back to shore...twice!
Yep, I volunteered to be an adult team member. Somehow, all the other teams had 12 kids, but our team had 5. However, Siobahn and Robin from Gillie's class, and Eva from class 5, and Quinn and Mia from class 3 were great! We had a blast. Another team claimed our pile of supplies, and it looked as if we were out of luck, but we ended up with 2 kayaks, and a ton of rope. Robin was excellent at "finding" (ie, sneaking off with) good supplies from other teams.
We had about 45 minutes to build our raft.
While we did not win the race, we came in about 5th. The winning team had 4 large Kiwi dads out pushing and pulling the raft....they were quickly tagged as cheaters! We got the award for smallest team with best raft. Our great prize? A hubcap!
However, seeing as the other awards included a zucchini, a small gourd (for the cheating team!), and a gumboot (rubber boot), I think we did well.
Gillie was not on my team, she had her own and they had much fun as well.
We all ate lunch, including a 'sausage sizzle'
(like a 'brat fry' by us, but they have different sausages),
then the kids swam more, and everyone packed up their stuff and we were done by 1:30pm!
If only school had been this fun when I was a kid!
Team 14's raft!
Robin, Eva, me, Siobahn, Quinn and Mia
Some of the competition
Quinn and Mia with our prize!
(hubcap)
(hubcap)
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