2023, education, Family, History, Kids, Uncategorized

First Day Of School

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Last Wednesday was our grandson’s first day of Kindergarten. He was happy, proud and confident. He is, after all, 5 years old, and in his mind, he can do anything! His parents were dewy eyed, and our DIL had to redo her eye makeup when she got to work after dropping grandson off. I reminded son that I missed his first day of school since I had moved to Iowa to do my psychology internship, leaving him for the year with his father.

My first day of school was in Mrs. Helling’s room. I teased my mother in the weeks before school as she, a Grade 3 teacher, was getting her room ready and I would go with her to the school , warning her that I would slip into Mrs. Cooney’s room next door. Wouldn’t you know, my teasing got me all confused and I actually went into Mrs. Cooney’s classroom and was told to go next door. I was mortified!

What are some of your memories of first days of school?

37 thoughts on “First Day Of School”

  2. Mom walking me to the bus stop and standing with me until I got on. Posed for a picture on the front step of our house with my name tag draped around my neck by a string. Being excited to finally get to go to school like my sister (who started a year before me).

    I pretty much loved school all the way through, except I wasn’t too crazy about the social aspect since I was the shy, brainy kid who didn’t make friends all that easily. I had several sports buddies by the time I got to HS, but they changed as I went into soccer and they continued in football and baseball. I never made the HS baseball team. 😦

    Chris in Owatonna

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  3. What I think was my first day of kindergarten was meeting a friend who I followed to her home and didn’t know how to get to where I lived. Her mother didn’t know either but she did figure it out so I did get home. We had just moved to Cloquet so I don’t know how she figured it out. My new friend and I stayed close through all years of school and still are.  Ps Did you ever have a class with one of my second cousins, Miss Appel, who taught in Luverne? 

    Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone

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      1. She did. And that’s when I got to know her. Both her parents were siblings of both my grandparents. (Grandmother’s brother and grandfather’s sister) She died suddenly the day before she was going to go to Norway with her nieces. I was so glad to get to know her at our family  gatherings. 

        Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone

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  4. I remember the annual photo on the front steps with my big brother before we walked the half block to school. Years of standing on that front step – all the way until I left for college. Modern technology means I can continue to demand first day of school photos from my daughter even though she is off at college (received her “first day of 14th grade” photos yesterday…).

    What I remember more about kindergarten was being fascinated by the cloak room. I went to an old-ish school, probably built in the 1920s – so it had wide, polished wood floor hallways, windows that took up most of the outside walls, and cloak rooms in some of the rooms. My kindergarten room had one – a little room adjacent to the classroom with hooks and a shelf above it. My name was on one of those hooks and I was so very proud of that. There was a space for my folding nap mat (with my name on it on the blue side in my mother’s handwriting – she clearly learned her lesson after letting my brother writing his own name on the red side of the mat when he used it four years prior). And almost assuredly I had some sort of bag for carrying things to and from school like my lunch (I had various lunchboxes including Peanuts, a faux denim look one with a big yellow dog on it, Dr Seuss…) – I don’t remember my bag at all, but I do remember my best friend Lisa’s bag which had an American Eagle pattern on it. And I remember the year I finally convinced my mother to get me the full box of 64 Crayola crayons with the sharpener instead of just the box of 8…

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    2. There was a cloak room in the elementary school I went to, too. The girls had to wear pants under our dresses to walk to school and we used the cloak room to remove the pants and just wear the required dresses.

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  5. I remember being walked over to Raymond Avenue School in South Central Los Angeles and asked to join a group of kids sitting on the stairs at the Southeast corner. Since my brother was already in the building, in 3rd grade, and I wanted to be big like him, it was no problem letting go of my mother, who had 2 other kids to take care of at home. I seem to remember feeling ready for this. Of course, that was in 1956, so it’s entirely possible that I’ve already forgotten crying fits.

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  6. My first day of school was first grade. I have told about it before. 1951. Got in trouble for being able to read, was sent to the principal for it on my first day. Miss Priest. She was going to tell off my mother but my mother told her off first.
    Clyde

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  7. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    I do not remember my first day at all, but I was very young, just days over 5 years for full day Kindergarten. I do remember the nap mats being very hard.

    I remember my son’s first day because when I asked him about it he said something like, “Whoa. That school was so big and there were people everywhere. I thought I might get lost. But it was fine.” I had walked him to school, the one block from home and saw him walk into the building.

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    1. My first day was my first day I can remember around kids my age. And there were so many of them, just in my room. The school district was going through an explosion of growth. We had crowded classrooms. Second grade i moved to the other building and we met in a refurbished storage room right off the kitchen with steel pillars in it. My second third and fourth grade teachers all got married at Christmas and therefore had to resign at the end of the year. I remember being lined up for polio shots.

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  9. I see my kindergarten experience as a cluster of vignettes:

    Despite living in the suburbs, our kindergarten was several miles away in a house-like building on the edge of another suburb, much more distant than the elementary schools. Consequently we were bussed there and our mothers saw us off on that first day at the bus stop. I was not yet five, so riding to school without an adult was a daunting experience.

    We brought our lunch from home. I had a metal lunchbox but I don’t remember its specifics. I remember that the bus ride in the morning smelled of peanut butter and hard boiled eggs. This was before the widespread use of plastic wrap and hard boiled eggs were wrapped in a roll of wax paper that was twisted on the ends.

    The school only had two kindergarten classes, one upstairs and one downstairs. Mine was upstairs. The teacher was Miss Mellon. She wore purple shoes. We played Duck Duck Gray Duck in the yard outside. There was a puzzle of the United States and Lee Carlson could do it all by himself. Those are the facts.

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  10. Like Bill, I have other kindergarten memories not from the first day… I remember sitting on the floor in a circle for Show and Tell – I think I brought a stuffed animal one time. I remember the teacher playing softly on the piano for rest time, on our little rugs. (I did this 23 years later with my kindergartners.) I remember the little milk carton after rest time.

    And I remember many of the little songs and finger plays she taught us… my mom would write some of them down when I got home.
    “Little cottage in the wood, little man by the window stood,
    Saw a rabbit hopping by, frightened as could be.
    Help me, help me, help! he said, ‘fore the hunter shoots me dead.
    Come, little rabbit, come inside, safely to abide.”

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  11. I don’t remember first days either. But random memories of 1st grade and Miss Crandle (who looked to be 60’s then. She really was fairly old) and her buttoning up my coat up to my neck. I hated that.
    And the turtle neck polyester shirts mom made me wear for pictures. ( no wonder I don’t like turtlenecks).

    Sitting in a box singing ‘Yellow Submarine’ very loud and all other kids looking in at me.
    And I was the only kid who could do ten pull up’s in first grade.
    I used to be skinny I guess.

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    1. I remember a lot of first grade. Mrs. Wright was my teacher – she had red hair like my mom’s. I was in a split 1st and 2nd grade classroom and Mrs. Wright let us decide how we wanted to group our desks. Also memorable, getting the big TV wheeled into the classroom for Spanish lessons – which I remember zero of, only that it was exciting to have the TV in the room.

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  14. My first kindergarten teacher was Mrs. Anderson at West Elementary. She was great and she boosted my confidence a lot. I do remember the first day of school making mats for rest time. Brown butcher paper — we laid on it and she drew our silhouettes around our bodies. (Rest time was very short so the fact that we were really just laying on butcher paper on the floor was not that big a deal.)

    Unfortunately we moved about 3/4 of the way through the year from Jefferson City to St. Louis. Mrs. Anderson was very concerned that the new school wouldn’t challenge me enough so she sent extra curricular materials to my mother on a regular basis for about a year that I got to do at home. I don’t remember the second kindergarten teacher in St Louis at all.

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  15. I don’t remember the first day of kindergarten but I do remember other things about the experience. For one thing, my mom always made me wear a pinafore over a plaid dress. It wasn’t a uniform, just what I wore almost every day. My pinafore had pockets. There was a magnetic cat in the room which fascinated me. So I put it in my pocket and brought it home. One of the first lessons I remember learning was that I was never to take things that didn’t belong to me and that when I made such a big mistake, I had to confess it to the teacher. I was marched back to kindergarten the next day and I had to present the little cat to the teacher and apologize in front of my mom, the teacher, and the whole class.

    Our mats were a bath towel that returned home with us every week to be washed. Not great for actually sleeping.

    A clearer memory is moving to Cannon Lake when I was 12. We left Owatonna the last day of 6th grade. I didn’t know then that I wouldn’t see my friends again, that we wouldn’t return to go back to school in Owatonna in the fall. I started 7th grade in Faribault at the old junior high, an imposing brick building with huge steps at the front entrance. I didn’t know a single soul. I was dropped off in front of those huge steps and had to find my way back through the entire building to Room 13, a small basement room near the boys locker room. The radiators in the hallway clanked and steamed. The boys peed on the radiators. My home room teacher was a wrestler and had a split earlobe. An earring had been ripped out of his ear. I was really at sea for a long time there. It took years to get to know people and fit in.

    That first day was the first day we had ever ridden a school bus. My mom walked us up our long driveway to meet the bus. As the bus took off, some boys threw a magazine out the back window at her. Later I heard her tell dad that it was a pornography magazine. I put my brothers and the neighbor girl in the only open seat left. I stood in the aisle with my arm on the back of the seat around my brother. We got dropped off at junior high and my brothers had to find the bus to their elementary school. I faced the big steps alone. I never knew I should look at the bus number and memorize it. There was a lot of confusion that afternoon. I had to find my brothers and the neighbor girl, then find the bus. I went from bus to bus, asking if they were going to Cannon Lake. No one seemed to know. Finally an older man looked at my anxious face with sympathy and helped us find bus 15. I’ll never forget that bus number again and how much I learned in one day when I was 12. I think that day explains a lot about my personality now.

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    1. Your bus story reminds me of the story of my youngest cousin on the first day of kindergarten. He was afternoon only, but his older siblings had been told to make sure he got on the bus home with them. Naturally, they forgot (he wasn’t on the bus in the morning after all). School bus drops them off at the end of their gravel road, Mom sees two children not three. The older two had forgotten to look for their younger brother. A few frantic calls to the school, school to bus company… Meanwhile across town, a blond kid is sitting and smiling in the front seat of a bus. He’s the last one on the bus – and the last stop has just been made. Bus driver turns and asks my cousin where he lived. “Dewes Road” came the reply. So the bus driver turned around – drove across town and dropped him off at his house, much to the relief of my aunt. His older siblings did not forget to look for him the next day.

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      1. I had some memorable bus drivers.
        While I never had Hermann, he drove a bus “forever” and rumor had it he was mean.
        In elementary school, for a few years, the bus went to another rural school and dropped off some kids and picked up a few more. That may have only been about first and second grade because that rural school wasn’t open very long.
        On our dead-end road, I only had one neighbor kid, Steve, and we were the same age. At the time I thought Steve was kind of a loser, but I didn’t have anybody else to play with, and we rode the bus together. I don’t remember much about the bus rides in the morning, we may have been the last ones to get picked up. But we were also the last ones to be dropped off in the afternoon, and the first driver I remember was a young man who taught us a lot about music. I think he’s the one that told us about Columbia house record club.
        Then there was Pam , the bus driver, she lived out in our neighborhood and, until she passed away just a few years ago, I would see her at Elections or township meetings.
        Steve and I were still the last ones off and if it was raining and I didn’t have a ride, she would take me down to the house. That was always a special treat.
        My best friend, Pete, who lived just about a mile away, probably tormented her too much. we would go out the back emergency door or go over to each other’s house, and we weren’t supposed to do that without having permission.

        Sons bus driver, Don was real good. Son left his backpack on the bus one day, Don found it, called the bus office, to call us, and Don made a special trip back with the backpack.

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  16. I only rode a school bus from grade 7 – 12. I knew the bus driver very well – he was my dad. The kids in my hometown were the last ones on in the morning and the first ones off in the afternoon. Dad always made sure the girls got on the bus before the boys. And he brooked no nonsense from the kids. He tolerated talking but not much more than that.

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  17. My father drove a school bus too, for a few years. He wasn’t assigned the route to our house, though, so my bus driver was a guy named Einar Anderson. Everyone called him Andy. He was kind and patient, but I have the sense that he would’ve liked the kids to just leave him alone so he could concentrate on his driving.

    I don’t remember very much about first days. The first day of kindergarten I was rather enamored of the set of big wooden blocks the boys were using to build impressive structures. But as a girl I conformed to other expectations.

    That’s the only first day of school I remember – there was never much fuss about any firsts in the subsequent years.

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  18. i had 4 first days
    kindergarten a bus ride all the way across town to the vfw morning shift
    1st grade two blocks down the hill from my house mornung shift (bloomington grew from 13,000 to 100,000 in those early 60’s)
    2nd grade (catholic school didn’t offer 1st grade and must have figured it would be easier to let public schools teach reading counting etc to the unprepared 1st graders then they could deliver them to catholic school
    7th grade getting the hell out of catholic school to modular scheduling no less)
    kindergarten was a kick i had no fear of the bus
    1st grade was fun learning reading and writing colors and chasing vicki erickson who was so cute but moved mid year
    2nd grade made me cry because the instructions for how to find your bus to go home came over the morning announcements and i didn’t understand and didn’t know where to find my bus
    7th grade was a school under construction built for 1600 students but serving 2600 so it was wild for a catholic school kid to navigate the a wing b wing c wing art dept music sept phy ed dept student union and be able to find a place to be when the mods changed every 15 minutes
    i was like being sent to new york city with a bad map to try to find my way around

    kindergarten was the easiest of the 4
    i had a great time no fear could ace every challange and the teachers were there as referees more than life coaches

    first grade started assignments and rules of conduct
    catholic school was jail
    public school was heaven

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