This one would have to be done after school is in session, for it involves finding things in and on their desks. Give them a few weeks to get some good “collections” going.
1. Go to each student’s desk and find something unusual and interesting on top of, or right inside of it.
2. Give each item a number with a big sticky note, and arrange them on a table.
3. When parents arrive, give each of them a pencil and a paper that reads something like this:
Please write your children’s names on the lines below, and beside each name write the number of the item you think we found from their desk.
The “prizes” for a few of the parents who guessed correctly were mini candy bars that we ate after we had pizza. (By the way, we tried to order pizza from “Pizza and More”, only to discover that “Pizza and More” didn’t have any pizza at all. We decided we didn’t want any “More” [since they probably didn’t have much of that either] and got some pizza from Miller’s Country Store. Ah, the joys of small-town living.)
Here are some of the more interesting items we found.
#3 A huge wad of kleenex. (These were from a girl’s desk by the way.)
#5 A large, rotted, stinking bone from “science” over a week before that grossed everyone out.
#7 Large bag of fossils
#8 An insect in a jar
#14 A picture of a truck. Yes, a truck. I know.
#16 A sqeaky frog
#18 A kimono bookmark a girl had made when we studied Japan.
#20 Another truck-- imagine that!
#21 A third grader’s name written in Russian. (We had been studying Russia and I had given them a copy of the Russian alphabet.)
#25 The “Sorry for hitting you in the eye please forgive me” note.