MVCA students welcome grandparents
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POLSON — Children peppered their grandparents with questions during Grandparents Day at Mission Valley Christian Academy on Nov. 14.
“What school did you go to?”
“How many kids were in your class?”
“What were some things you didn’t have when you were a kid?”
“What were you known as in school?”
In Mallory Witham’s fifth and sixth grade classroom, grandparents talked about school when they were students. A couple of grandparents attended country schools, where first through eighth graders were in the same room, and one teacher instructed them all.
“We didn’t even know about an icebox. We didn’t know what grandparents did in school,” fifth grade student Austin Nelson said.
Girls wore dresses to school, grandparent Linda Schoon said. If it was cold, they wore pants under their dresses and, as soon as they reached the school, they hurried to the bathroom to remove their pants.
One punishment was wearing a dunce cap and sitting on a stool in the corner, and several grandparents remembered this.
“We respected our teachers,” Schoon said. “We weren’t scared of them, but there was a little fear.”
Schoon said on the first day of school she brought two No. 2 pencils, a box of crayons, an eraser and a tablet. She can’t believe all the school supplies kids nowadays require, she noted.
Students honored their grandparents by inviting them to come to school for the morning. Kids played their recorders, recited memorized scriptures, sang with the choir and shared their classrooms and school day with grandmothers and grandfathers.
About 63 grandparents came for the event in a school of approximately 75 kids, according to Chris Bumgarner, director of MVCA. Some grandparents traveled from California, Washington and Oregon to attend.
This is the first year for Grandparents Day at MVCA, Bumgarner said, but it will become an annual event since it was such a smashing success.
“The grandparents were thrilled, and the kids are flying,” he added.
The goal for Grandparents Day was to “revisit Biblical mandates of honoring elders” and their teaching.
“We wanted them to ask questions and see what we’re doing here at MVCA,” Bumgarner explained. “We really want to have them connect with us. We asked grandparents to pray for us for the next 31 days,” adding that if grandparents who live in the area want to volunteer or help with Friday meals, they could get involved, or not, as they pleased.
