Our Classroom/Family Fun Run
Getting Ready is Almost the Best Part

It'll be Sarah as a spotted giraffe, tromping through the
woods of Tolland at our Run, Spot, Run!

Preparing for Run, Spot, Run! May 5, 2000 by Carol Goodrow Our third annual "Run, Spot, Run!", classroom/family fun run will be held this year. It's always a fun event. We invite our families and we all run or run/walk a one mile cross country trail. We have a raffle, wear running numbers and get medals or ribbons, but the more we are involved in the planning and preparation, the more fun we have! It is so easy to plan an event like this. We hope that your class will have a fun run sometime too! Here's what we do: 1. First, we call the town recreation department. We reserve the park for a Saturday morning. We are really lucky. The person in charge of our rec department comes from a family of runners. He always helps us map our one mile route. 2. Our room mothers call other parents and arrange for people to bring food, and drinks. They also are planning on having balloons for us. Last year we had helium balloons. Maybe we'll have them again! 3. We practice our running in gym twice a week with our gym class and with our classroom teacher on Fridays. We work hard. We are used to running on a trail and watching out for rocks and twigs. 4. We decorate running numbers for our families and for ourselves. The theme is "Run, Spot, Run!" In the past, the other classes only decorated with dalmatians, but we decided to use any spotted animals this year. We often pretend that we are animals when we run. We made a chart and listed as many spotted animals as we could think of. This was a lot more fun. We love dalmatians but we studied about them in the fall when we had a fire safety unit. Of course our teacher designed a running dalmatian tee shirt so dalmatians will still be part of our event. 5. We write letters to our parents telling them that we were supposed to make spotted animal costumes to wear in the fun run. We are going to get our tee shirts after we cross the finish line. We use our very best printing on our letters and we have to address envelopes too! We have learned a lot in first grade. We worked so hard today on getting ready for "Run, Spot, Run" that we almost ran out of time to go running. We decided to push the desks out of the way and do some fun drills right in the classroom at the end of the day. We got into rows of 4 or 5 and after the teacher said, "Ready, set, go!" (just like the Arizona Cheetahs), we did knee highs, or butt kicks across the room. Oh, only 4 kids at a time got to go, so there was no pushing, bumping or crowding. It was lots of fun. We think we know what Sarah's mother is coming to Run, Spot, Run as...a spotted bunny. Artwork by Sarah We still have lots to do, so please visit with us again.