Once Upon a Time… Cee & Pete Came to the Pine Palace! 

Once upon a time—well, actually today—two very special grandmothers arrived at the Pine Palace with stories from their own second-grade days! Their granddaughter calls them Cee and Pete, and we were so excited to welcome them to Room 102!

Pete took us all the way to Rhode Island, where she attended Catholic school. She wore a uniform every single day and carried her lunch to school in a lunch box. And what was sometimes inside? A peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwich! 

Pete told us that beautiful penmanship was a BIG deal. If you were really good at handwriting, you earned the special privilege of writing with a fountain pen!    She also remembered sinks that had foot pedals to turn on the water. Second grade sure looked different back then!

 Cee brought us a story that warmed our hearts. She told us about a special friend she met when she was in second grade—and they are STILL friends today! What a wonderful reminder that some of the friendships being made right here in the Pine Palace could last a lifetime!

Cee, who is from Greenwood, South Carolina, also loved to jump rope when she was a little girl. She brought a jump rope for our class so we can have some old-fashioned playground fun of our own! She also brought a paper copy of a Weekly Reader from when she was in second grade. It was so much fun comparing her school days to ours!

 Today’s Pine Palace lesson: School supplies may change, lunches may change, and classrooms may change—but friendship, fun, and wonderful school memories never go out of style!

Thank you, Cee and Pete, for adding another wonderful chapter to our Grandparents Month story! 

And they all learned happily ever after… 

 

Aloha from Mimi! 

Our Grandparents Month adventures took us all the way to Hawaii today! Mimi came to visit and shared some fascinating memories from her elementary school days.

Because Mimi’s dad was in the military, her family moved often, and she attended five different elementary schools! One of those schools was in beautiful Hawaii, where school looked very different from ours at Pine Street.

Mimi told us that they didn’t have a cafeteria, and students had to take off their shoes before entering the school! She could even see Pearl Harbor from her backyard.

One of our favorite things to learn about was May Day. The students prepared for it all year long and practiced special dances throughout the year for the celebration. And instead of fire drills, Mimi remembered practicing tidal wave drills!

Mimi gave each student a beautiful lei as a special reminder of the time she spent living in Hawaii.  What a thoughtful way to bring a little bit of Hawaii into Room 102!

She also brought us the book Froggy Goes to Hawaii. After Mimi left, we read the story together and enjoyed continuing our Hawaiian adventure through a book. 

 

Another Walk Down Memory Lane at Pine Street!

Today we had another wonderful Grandparents Month visit, and this time we were lucky enough to welcome a grandfather and a dad to our classroom!

Grandfather had a special connection to our school because he attended Pine Street School for sixth grade! He shared some of his favorite memories with us, including the good food in the cafeteria—some things are definitely worth remembering! He even remembered his sixth-grade teacher after all these years.

He also told us about the fun he had playing games on the playground and how he walked to school every single day. The children loved hearing how different—and in some ways, how similar—school life was when he was a student.

We have loved hearing so many wonderful stories during Grandparents Month. It is extra special when our visitors can share memories made right here at Pine Street School. 

Another sweet day of connecting the Pine Street of yesterday with the Pine Street of today!

  Book Character Day at Pine Street! 

Today, the halls of Pine Street School looked like the pages of our favorite books had come to life! As part of our Read-a-Thon celebration, students AND teachers dressed up as their favorite book characters! 

From silly characters to adventurous heroes and everything in between, there was no shortage of imagination and creativity. It was so much fun seeing everyone’s costumes and trying to guess which books they came from!

What a wonderful way to celebrate our love of reading! Days like today remind us that when we open a book, we can travel anywhere, meet anyone, and have an amazing adventure—all without ever leaving our classroom.

Keep reading, Pine Palace! Our next great adventure is only a page away! 

 

 Another Trip Back in Time with Grandma!

On Friday, we welcomed a very special grandmother all the way from Columbia, South Carolina, and she brought some fascinating pieces of school history with her!

One of the most interesting things she shared was how children received the polio vaccine on a sugar cube at school. She even brought sugar cubes so the children could see what they looked like and we got to sample a sugar cube. The kiddos could hardly believe that something as important as a vaccine was once given on a little cube of sugar!

She also brought an old wooden school desk like the one she used when she was a student. Of course, everyone wanted a turn sitting in it! It was so much fun comparing her school desk to the tables and chairs we use in our classroom today.

But the best surprise of all was learning that Grandma skipped second grade when she was a child! That meant her visit to Room 102 was actually her very first time ever being in a second-grade classroom! We were pretty excited that after all these years, she finally got to experience second grade—and we were honored that her first second-grade classroom was ours!

What a wonderful afternoon of stories, history, and making memories together. Our Grandparents Month continues to teach us that some things about school have changed a lot, but learning from one another never goes out of style! 

A Twist Back in Time!

Our Grandparents Month adventures continued today with another wonderful visit! We had a very special grandmother come to Room 102, and she brought so many fun memories from her school days to share with us.

Since we are currently raising money through our Read-A-Thon, she told us that when she was young, they sometimes had sock hops for fundraisers. Of course, we couldn't just talk about a sock hop—she taught us how to DO THE TWIST!   Our second graders may be Read-A-Thon kids, but today they got a little taste of sock-hop fun!

She also brought every child a set of jacks and taught us how to play. It was so much fun learning a game that children enjoyed long before tablets and video games!  She also demonstrated how to hula hoop!

One of our favorite moments was when she brought in her encyclopedias and introduced us to the "old Google!"   Before you could type a question into a computer and have an answer in seconds, you had to look it up in a book!

She even shared a report she wrote when she was in second grade, which made it extra special for our second graders to see. We also learned how students used brown paper grocery bags to make covers for their schoolbooks—a clever way to protect those precious textbooks!

And apparently, textbooks weren't just for reading! 📚 She showed us how students practiced good posture by balancing their textbooks on their heads and walking without letting them fall off. Of course, we had to give that a try, too! Who knew textbooks could double as posture trainers? 😂

We danced the Twist, hula hooped, played jacks, balanced books on our heads, and learned about life in a classroom many years ago. We traveled back in time without ever leaving Room 102!

We danced, played, laughed, learned, and traveled back in time without ever leaving Room 102. 

These Grandparents Month visits have been such a gift to our class. Each grandparent brings a little piece of history through the doors of the Pine Palace, and our kiddos are discovering that some of the very best lessons aren't found in a textbook—they're found in the stories and memories of the people who came before us.