Bring on summer! Students frolic in Field Day activities

Shrieks of joy rang out at Hamblen Elementary and other Spokane schools Wednesday on the cusp of summer break.

Thursday is the last day of school. There will be goodbyes and locker clean-outs, instruments to lug home and last-minute summer plans to hatch with friends.

But first was Wednesday’s annual Field Day.

An end-of-school-year celebration held at many local schools, Field Day includes a host of outdoor games like giant Jenga, Twister, sack races and a water-balloon toss. At Hamblen, each age group took an hour and 15 minutes to romp outside in a preview of summer days to come.

“It’s a great way to celebrate the end of the year,” Principal Stefanie Heinen said. “We’ve been doing it for a long, long time.”

It’s also a great way to get kids outside and active, she said. There were 25 different games. Organizers try to bring in new activities every year, but there are some classics like Twister that come back year after year, Heinen said.

In one event kids held an inflatable tube around their waste as they ran, jumping over short obstacles. In another they sat in front of kiddie pools partially filled with water and tried to remove marbles using only their feet. Other kids blew giant bubbles and tried to kick a soccer ball past a goalie.

Wednesday was scheduled to be the last day of school, but the last day is now Thursday as the school district finishes the last of five makeup days after schools shut down for a week after last November’s windstorm walloped the region.

The five days were made up one day per month since January, which didn’t make the school year much longer, Heinen said.

“The good thing is there’s only one tacked at the end,” she said.

Second-grader Ava Lewis, 7, said her favorite event is the limbo. But she also planned to stop by the pools filled with marbles to try to match last year’s performance.

“I think it was 32,” she said when asked how many she managed to collect in a minute.

Her secret weapon is her right foot. Lewis said she can spread the toes on that foot really wide.

“I can put my foot in and grab the marbles,” she said.

It may not have been the warmest Field Day on record, but that didn’t stop the students from having a good time.

A one boy declared: “ninety hundred percent awesome.”