The Chronicles Of Nay

Happy Saturday! I hope that everyone has had a great week! Not that anyone is counting but we only have 4 more days till summer!!! Today is muggy and gross! This is for sure part of Texas that I just never get used to, the humidity!

Thursday was my favorite day of the year! Egg drop day! We used to consistently do it at the 6th grade center but we haven’t done it much here at the middle school. The kids create something that would keep an egg safe when dropped from about 2 stories high! Then we open them and see if they survived! The first time I tried to set this up here are the middle school I emailed everyone I could think of that would have a bucket truck. That is what I had used before Covid. TxDOT sent out a couple guys and a bucket truck. He would stand in the truck and we would load up the bucket around him with the projects. He would go up and drop them sort of one by one. After covid I lost that contact so I ended up talking to the people from keep Fort Worth Beautiful. These are the trucks that they use for bulk pick up and trash collection. The one with the claw is called a boom truck (or so I was told). They bring out a truck and the kids put their projects in the claw then the guy lifts the claw up and opens it drops them! Then the kids go get their projects and check if their egg survived.

This year I emailed the person from last time and she forwarded my information to someone else and they responded. I hadn’t checked with my principal if we could do it, I hadn’t checked with my team if they wanted to do it. I expected the city to say no because it was such short notice! haha To my surprise they said “Sure! We can send a team out there Thursday the 15th.” I said um… ok Great! haha I got all the clearances, I got the directions in the kids hands and we were set to go for the 15th!

The directions I give the kids are “no glass, no food (Other than the egg obviously!) and have fun!” There is a myth busters episode where they put it in a jar of peanut butter it will survive or it is just on the internet maybe. Anyway, we had to ban food so that kids wouldn’t use that, It is so messy and it just feels like cheating! The city of Fort Worth showed up Thursday morning with 2 trucks! I was a little worried that my students weren’t going to participate but they did! They did some amazing projects. There are a few below! There is also a short video of a couple of the drops. The last picture is the aftermath at the end of the day!

I was very spoiled the first 12 years of my career. I taught at a 6th grade center where there just 6th grade in the entire building and there were like 30 of us teachers. I often forget that we aren’t that little pocket anymore. I am reminding for activities like this. I had never had any issues finding adults to help me wrangle kids. I was short a few adults yesterday. I had kids that were unsupervised, I am pretty sure there were rocks being thrown. I had kids that didn’t participate that didn’t have a place to go. Perhaps this is an unpopular opinion but I don’t think that the students that don’t do a project should get to go outside and watch everything go down!

I have a few hurdles when it comes to planning for next year. First of all I will only see my kids every other day so I will either have to do this 2 days or figure out a way to get all my kids outside on one day. Also I will need volunteers to help me crowd control outside. I will also need a sub to keep my kids that aren’t participating. It is an entire year away but I won’t be accused of dropping any balls (just eggs! haha) 2 years in a row!

There were a lot of moving parts and I know the kids had such a great time! Other teachers told me that the kids were telling them if their egg survived or not. Kids got to be creative, and even the 7th graders that usually seem too big and bad had such a great time! I want to thank Keep Fort Worth Beautiful for donating the resources and the man power to make this happen! Also Thank you to all of you that Donated Eggs! I was able to get kids to participate that might not have been able to participate otherwise! There were a couple hiccups but over all I think it was a great success! Again Thank you for the people that helped make this day such an awesome one for the kids! I hope that everyone has a GREAT weekend!