Jonesport Elementary School
silver medal winning school, winterkids winter games 2020
Town: Jonesport, Maine
County: Washington
Excerpts from an interview with Marni Crowley, 5th Grade Teacher at Jonesport Elementary
Why was it important for your students to participate in the WinterKids Winter Games?
Honestly, we wanted to win the $5000! We have a wonderful trail out behind our school. We wanted to purchase snowshoes so we can get the kids in our school outside more often! Little did we know, we ended up LOVING the whole competition aspect! Our school worked so hard to ensure that everyone was involved in our events and we just pumped each other up!!!
What did the Winter Games mean for your school and community?
The first thing we did was get the school and community “hooked” with our theme. The STEAM theme for WinterKids, Winter Games led to our “mascot” STEAMY the lobster. It all flowed from there! Our hashtag #getcrackinjonesport & our event t-shirts were well known in the community! We made a trap tree for our closing ceremonies & invited all of our lobstering families to put a buoy on the tree.
We made lots of “events” on Facebook and invited the community! We invited them to our Opening Ceremonies, our Winter Family Fun Night, the Winter Carnival, the Closing Ceremonies & our Top 3 reveal! So many people attended these events to show their support for our school!
Finally, the feedback we got after each event was amazing! Happy faces, happy hearts, and excited kids made the hard work worth it!
Tell us about one or two of your favorite memories from the Games.
Oh, there were so many! Our Opening Ceremony was pretty epic! We had two Anah Temple Shriners bring their mini lobster boats to lead the parade! The next was a community member pulling their family’s lobster boat with the secretary & bus driver (dressed as lobsters) and the gym teacher (dressed as a lobsterman) in the stern of the boat! Then the students were all dressed in their Get Crackin’ Jonesport t-shirts carrying their lobster crafts or WinterKids signs. We walked around our school and up to the High School where the high school students were outside chanting Get Crackin Jonesport! Parents were lined up along the path cheering us on! It was amazing!
The second memory was our Winter Family Fun Night. Teachers and volunteers ran different stations (based off of the Bingo Board) and families were just allowed to go around as they wanted! We were fortunate to have snow on the ground this year-yeah!- so the two most popular stations were the sledding and snowshoeing! It was so awesome to see the efforts made for parents without vehicles to come to the event. We even had some grandparents come! There is nothing like seeing a Grampy slide with their granddaughter! You can’t help but smile.
