Back in the early days of Upper School football under Coach
Bill Carter, and before Booster Night traditions started, the Upper School
football team would conduct a preseason scrimmage to help prepare the team for
its upcoming season. Rather than charge regular admission to spectators, the
price of admission was a bar of soap. The soap bars were collected and put in a
large box, no doubt supplied by Love Box Company, and the box was then stored
near the showers for the athletes to use throughout the year after practices
and games. One less item for the School to pay for on an annual basis!
If you have a photo from one of the soap scrimmages, please share it with us! In the meantime, please enjoy these football photos from the early '70s! Do you remember the soap scrimmages? Please take time to post a comment or memory from this or any of the traditions posted on this blog!
Friday, September 27, 2013
Friday, September 20, 2013
Dads' Day, by Kaye Myers, former Head of Early Childhood
In the fall of 1986, fathers
of Early Childhood students received the first invitation to Dads’ Day. For the next twenty-seven years dads have
accompanied their children to school for a half day of great activities as
students shaved their dads with shaving cream and popsicle sticks, made and
flew paper airplanes, challenged dad to Giant Gym activities, etc. For many
years Jack Shumard and his many reptiles made frequent appearances and almost
everyone wanted to hold his eight foot boa constrictor. The parade of motor
vehicles was always a big hit: eighteen
wheelers, patrol cars, fire trucks, concrete mixers and a variety of automobiles
and motor cycles. Each year dads or their surrogates are
greeted by exciting adventures with their sons and daughters.
Check out these photos from Dads' Day throughout the years, and click on "Post a Comment" to share your own great memories from this event!
How About Those All-School Pep Rallies? by Chris Ashbrook, Upper School Head
All-School Pep Rallies are the perfect time to take a break
from our rigorous curriculum and simply yell and scream support of the
Spartans. Our younger students get us
all fired up with their love of the high school teams and their unbridled
enthusiasm. They start making noise
which in turn makes the Middle School students make noise which then leads to the Upper School students making
sure that they make the most noise. It
is always loud and lots of fun. I know
that the student athletes we are recognizing always feel supported and
important. What a thrill! We take the time to recognize athletic
participants from preschool to our varsity teams and it is amazing to realize
that nearly every student at the school is participating in something during
any given season.
The times where we come together as an entire school to
celebrate are indeed precious. The
students thrive on one another’s positive energy and we are all proud to be a
part of the Collegiate family. Whether
in the amphitheater, the football stadium, the gym, or the quad, all of our
students can’t help but enjoy the opportunity to come together as one and
celebrate.
Saturday, September 7, 2013
Overnight Trips
For many years, WCS students have enjoyed overnight trips. Share your own memories of the following trips by clicking on COMMENTS at the end of this post!
Third Grade Trips by Belinda Mould, 3rd grade
teacher
Each year the third grade goes on an end-of-the-year
trip. For the last 18 years, it has been to Oklahoma City. We have
gone on chartered buses, visited the Oklahoma Botanical Zoo, and stayed in the
Oklahoma Science Museum. This museum was ours for the night with a staff
there just for our fun! They blew up things for us, let us handle snakes
just before bedtime, showed us an IMAX movie, ran "come and go"
science centers of our choosing, opened their gift shop at night, presented a
planetarium show, and let us sleep on the floor. That's right sleep on
the floor! This last piece was not always a hit with the parents, and
rumors passed from year to year so that parents were always looking for those
coveted sleeping spots, sometimes way before the midnight bedtime.
That midnight bedtime was not always too popular with the
parents either, but the kids loved it; and the trip was all about the kids.
Oh, I must mention the favorite kid spot . . . the treehouse. This
treehouse is impossible to explain, but it was huge and you could shoot rubber
balls and other objects from the top level. The next day, we returned to
Wichita very tired, but with wonderful memories and "if" the parents
were lucky, the kids slept all the way home.
Third Grade Trips by Belinda Mould, 3rd grade
teacher
Each year the third grade goes on an end-of-the-year
trip. For the last 18 years, it has been to Oklahoma City. We have
gone on chartered buses, visited the Oklahoma Botanical Zoo, and stayed in the
Oklahoma Science Museum. This museum was ours for the night with a staff
there just for our fun! They blew up things for us, let us handle snakes
just before bedtime, showed us an IMAX movie, ran "come and go"
science centers of our choosing, opened their gift shop at night, presented a
planetarium show, and let us sleep on the floor. That's right sleep on
the floor! This last piece was not always a hit with the parents, and
rumors passed from year to year so that parents were always looking for those
coveted sleeping spots, sometimes way before the midnight bedtime.
That midnight bedtime was not always too popular with the
parents either, but the kids loved it; and the trip was all about the kids.
Oh, I must mention the favorite kid spot . . . the treehouse. This
treehouse is impossible to explain, but it was huge and you could shoot rubber
balls and other objects from the top level. The next day, we returned to
Wichita very tired, but with wonderful memories and "if" the parents
were lucky, the kids slept all the way home.
This past year the third
graders went to Kansas City. Oklahoma City had a scheduling problem so
the third grade teachers decided to check out Science City Museum in K.C. We
would be their first school to spend a weekday night at the museum. The next
day we would travel to the Deanna Rosa Farmland Since we had been
taking students to OKC for almost 20 years we weren't sure this trip was
going meet our expectations. The trip far exceeded them. We were blessed
with beautiful weather; great, exciting classes; happy, well behaved kids; and
a lot of fun for everyone! We look forward to KC next year!
Heigh Ho! Heigh Ho!
It’s Off to Camp We Go!
The 4th Grade Trip, by 4th grade teacher Meghan Smith
The 4th Grade Trip, by 4th grade teacher Meghan Smith
The Fourth Grade campout has been a tradition for over 20
years in the Lower School! To end each school year, the fourth graders pack up
and head to Rock Springs 4-H camp in Junction City, Kansas. This is the first
overnight field trip with just teachers as chaperones. It has been a time of endless laughter,
practical jokes and activity-packed days. Students enjoy searching streams for
crawfish, riding horses, shooting rifles, aiming arrows during archery and
working together. It wouldn’t be a campout without Coach Funke’s traditional
medallion hunt after dinner. We end the
day toasting s’mores around the campfire and watching hilarious skits made up
from each cabin group. It is a jam-packed
36 hours of memories in the making for fourth graders to carry with them
throughout their Collegiate career and beyond.
5th
Grade Overnight Trips by Jessica Mallard, 5th grade math teacher
The destination of the first 5th
grade overnight trip was the Flint Hills, featuring an old-fashioned Wagon
Train. This unique
trip included eating a genuine chuck wagon supper, breakfast cooked over an
open fire, and sleeping under the stars! After several years, 5th
graders began staying at Embassy Suites Hotel in Kansas City, visiting museums
like Steamboat Arabia and Union Station’s Science City. Students had fun
swimming and going out to eat in a big group at Winstead’s (home of the famous
and delectable cheeseburger and fries), seeing IMAX movies, and taking science
enrichment classes. In recent years, the overnight trip has taken on a Medieval
flavor as the students have spent the day at the Kansas City Renaissance
Festival to prepare them to host the annual 5th grade Medieval Faire
fundraiser. In 2012, students were treated to a tour of the newly restored
McPherson Opera House after spending a fun evening at Rock Springs making
s’mores and doing teambuilding activities.
Sixth
Grade Trip to Hannibal, by Lynda Connell, former WCS faculty member
Near
the end of September, beginning in the early ‘90s, sixth graders piled into two
buses and traveled to Hannibal, Missouri.
The first novel read during the school year was Tom Sawyer, so the trip was designed to bring to life some of the
events in the book, and to learn more about the author. Parents, teachers, and students spent the night
in the Holiday Inn. The two-day trip was
filled with visits to historic sites in Hannibal, including the Mark Twain
boyhood home and museum, walking by the whitewashed fence, viewing the
Mississippi River, and touring the cave which was an important site in the
novel. A highlight of the trip was an
outdoor evening performance which dramatized scenes from Tom Sawyer, all familiar to the students. Some years the weather was quite cold to sit
outside for the show, but at the end of the year, the trip to Hannibal was
always mentioned as one of the best memories.
7th Grade
Trips by Devon Rothwell ’71, WCS math teacher
What about the 8th grade trip?
We're saving that one for later, when it will be included in an article about the Heifer Project!
Share your fun memories of these trips by clicking on "Comments."
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