Día Del Niño, or Children’s Day for you stateside gringos, is exactly what it sounds like: a holiday dedicated to the existence of children. This is a lovely demonstration of how strongly Honduran culture values family– and a great reason for a party at each of the BECA schools. Here are the accounts of the holiday by a teacher at each of BECA’s three schools, including all the makings of a Honduran party: lots of piñatas, Disney characters, and fried chicken.
Día Del Niño at SMBS (by Ryan Hebel)
It’s a bit strange watching children race into school, faces alight with glee and anticipation. But this was Santa Monica’s Día del Niño celebration – a school day where teachers come to school in grass skirts, Hawaiian leis, swim trunks, and sandals.
The students spent most of the day bouncing around the carnival-like schoolyard, following their grade to different activities. They raced eggs with spoons, pinned tails on creative parts of a donkey, threw balls through clown faces, and got their faces painted. At the cool-down stations, they wrote about their dream jobs for a photo booth, with aspirations ranging from doctors and teachers, to soldiers and vampire slayers. In the library, they took pictures with book covers, trading faces with characters like Wreck-It-Ralph, Belle, Brave, and Edwin the Emu. Each grade capped off the great day with cake, ice cream, and (of course) brutally flogging piñatas to smithereens like starving sugar -vultures.
Día Del Niño at ADJ (by Emma Pampanin)
It’s 2:30 on Wednesday, and by 9:00 AM tomorrow the Amigos de Jesus teachers need to have the school decorated, games ready, tickets cut, prize store set up, and an intro dance prepared for Día Del Niño. I remember this seeming an impossible task when faced with it last year, but I knew to expect nothing short of brilliance this time. I know now what a team of volunteer teachers can accomplish after school when they know that their 5:00 PM scheduled ride home will only happen if the work is finished.
So as expected, this years’ Día Del Niño at ADJ was a brilliant success. It began with a choreographed teacher dance to “Gagnam Style,” which by all accounts was perfectly executed, despite the minimal run-throughs (the teachers’ secret? Zumba classes! It’s not that big of a secret). The day’s games began shortly after. There were classic game day events such as bowling using 2 liter bottles and wheelbarrow race relays. One new hit this year was the pencil toss, where students raced bouncing pencils eraser side down on to a table and then into a cup. The 3 hours flew by, and the prize store thoroughly depleted by the end of the game time.
The DDN tradition of fried chicken and tajadas for lunch was upheld, as was the smashing of various piñatas, but afterwards a new one developed. To fill the empty post-lunch, pre-clean up time, a brilliant ADJ volunteer proposed an outdoor dance party. The party included an encore of Gangnam Style by the teachers, some more familiar choreographed dances led by knowledgeable teachers, and then, as all good dance parties do, morphed into a school-wide groove fest that only ended five songs after the song that the principal announced would be the last. Día del Niño 2015 at ADJ then came to a sweaty, and satisfying end.
Día Del Niño at SJBS (by Tanya Malusev)
Día del Niño 2015 got off to a stressful start for SJBS teachers, when we received a surprise announcement at 7:48 AM that we would be performing a Zumba dance during the festivities. After four minutes of haphazard preparation and a collective decision to wing it, we all headed off to find our respective classes. A sea of students, adorned in cat face paint (or, for the middle schoolers, excessive hair gel) and their trendiest color clothes were there to greet us. Gathered together in the auditorium, the kids were treated to raffle prizes, dances from each grade, and various games the teachers had prepared. After the final dance (1), the students were dismissed to their classrooms to await food (usually pizza), soda, and dessert.
Before I continue, I must acknowledge the dark side of Día del Niño. Though exciting, many classroom teachers describe this day as “the bane of [their] existence.” (2) While the parents are responsible for providing the food, and the kids are good at creating their own entertainment, the sense that you should be in control of whatever happens in your classroom is hard to relinquish — and having 22 sugar-high children singing as their parents frantically pass out soda makes one feel decidedly out of control. I spent most of last year’s DDN sitting at a student’s desk, holding a half-eaten hamburger and wondering how it was only 10:30 AM.
But this year, I’m the Resource Teacher. And that means I don’t have one classroom, I have five. And that means there’s another teacher responsible for watching each grade. And that means I had far more freedom than my classroom-teacher peers once the students were in their rooms and waiting for food. I am hard-pressed to describe the feeling of walking through the halls and having six of the lovely, generous mothers from our school insist that I come in to eat pizza and candy. It is a heady combination of joy and power; I felt like royalty and imagine my ego will never fully recover. Ice cream cone in one hand and two slices of pizza in the other, I spent the rest of the day strolling around the school with my camera, watching five-year-olds swing at and repeatedly miss their piñata, playing a strange interpretation of football with my 8th graders, and generally enjoying something I don’t focus on enough on a normal school day – watching my students be children, in the happiest sense of the word possible.
(1) Zumba was a SMASHING success, as you were undoubtedly/anxiously wondering.
(2) For the less dramatic, “tiring.”
