Lincoln welcomes parents, families to VIP Day

Parents, grandparents and older siblings got to re-live their childhood today during Lincoln Elementary School?s VIP Day. The day is a time for students to bring a family member to school to sit with them in class and experience what it?s like to be a kid again.

Nancy Clawson showed her sixth-grade class how to use a computer program called Google Earth. The program contains a map of the world that is compiled from satellite images. Each student was given a laptop on which to test out the program. The students typed in the address of their school into the program and were able to see the building, the playground, and all the surrounding houses, just as if they were looking at them from an airplane.

Ron Gates attended Clawson?s class that day to be with his grandson, Sam Donnolly. Donnolly said the class started working with the mapping program yesterday. He said it was fun to see famous buildings and landmarks form a bird?s eye view.

?Now I?m looking for the Pyramids of Giza,? he said.

Gates said Friday was the first VIP Day he has ever attended. He went to elementary school in Oakdale. He said technology has changed considerably since he was in school.

?We didn?t have computers,? he said. ?We didn?t sit at tables, either. We had desks. We were in the same room all the time. When you got to eighth grade, you went to study hall as your last class.?

Joe Christner was at Lincoln with his stepdaughter Madison. Christner said he has come to VIP Day several times before. He also went to elementary school at Lincoln, as did his nephew. He said Lincoln is bigger than he remembers it.

?There is way more technology than what we had back then,? he said. ?My kids actually like coming to school. We didn?t have anything fun to do. We didn?t get to play on computers. It?s different now.?

Christner said he and his family just moved back to Washington from Iowa City about six months ago. He said he is thoroughly impressed with elementary education in Washington.

?The one-on-one interaction is better here,? he said. ?She gets her homework done at school now. She?s not bringing it home. She?s not struggling.?

Christner said there are many more after-school programs now than when he was in school. Madison is in band and a program called ?Contraption Challenge.?

Madison describes the program as one in which ?we take a simple, everyday task such as raising a flag and make it as complicated as possible.?

Jim and Myrna Mittler were invited to the school by their grandson, John Lisauskas. They said they?ve been to Lincoln before when other grandchildren have invited them to come. Myrna attended elementary school in Kalona while Jim attended elementary school in Gary, Ind.

?Elementary school was primitive back then,? Jim said. ?It was simple ? reading, writing and arithmetic. There were no computers. There was nothing electronic. Looking back, it was like living in the Stone Age.?

Myrna said that her elementary school had two grades per classroom.

?We didn?t have bookbags then,? she said. ?We just carried our books.?

?And we dropped our books a lot,? Jim added.

Myrna said she was amazed that all the students in the class had a laptop to work on. Jim said that another significant change he has noticed is that children have great difficulty reading cursive handwriting today.

Myrna said, ?I?ll write something in cursive to my grandson and he?ll say, ?Grandma, I can?t read that.? That?s sad.?

Fifth-grader Dacota Miller invited his big brother Travis Peterson to be his special guest for VIP Day. Peterson said it was his first time as a VIP guest but not his first visit to Lincoln. He is a Lincoln graduate himself.

Peterson said the size of the building has grown since he left. He said the school used to feature portable trailers but that that space has become part of the building?s permanent structure. He said many of the teachers in the school are new since he was at the school and that he hadn?t seen one he knew except for the principal, Dave Hoffman.

Peterson said he was a little bit worried about sitting on the small seats on the lunch tables.

?Everything seems smaller than I remember it,? he said.