First things first

Danette Goulet

They all began their first school year together in Room 30 at

Paularino Elementary School in Costa Mesa.

On Friday, Polly Ortega and her 19 young charges said goodbye. The

kindergartners will go on to first grade next year, and she will be given

her second crop of children to teach and guide.

“It’s interesting, because I hear a lot of our teachers saying

‘finally,’ but personally I’m really going to miss them,” the first-year

teacher said. “I love them.”

After a decade in the business world, this was Ortega’s first year in

the world of 5- and 6-year-olds.

“It was not as stressful as I thought it would be,” she said.

Had the whole year been like the last day, however, it might have been

a lot more stressful.

It was berserk.

It started as a rather quiet kindergarten day, despite the doubled

class size, but it turned into the annual mayhem of the last day of

school.

At 8:30 a.m., students from both the “early birds” and the “late owls”

sessions sat cross-legged at Ortega’s feet with, for the most part,

little hands in their laps while she read them a story.

During the next activity, students were still relatively calm. Their

assignment: pretend they were scientists who just discovered a new fish.

Off to their tables they went to draw an imaginary fish, which they

named and decided where it was found.

Still teaching on the last day, Ortega incorporated the difference

between real and make believe.

When one little girl asked if she could draw a mermaid, Ortega

enthusiastically agreed, asking the class if mermaids were real or

imaginary. Several students piped up with make believe until Kenny

Vargas, 6, corrected them.

“No -- real, they live at the bottom,” he said.

Some students worked painstakingly on this task while others finished

quickly and moved on to writing a final entry in their kindergarten

journals.

As 19 children have very different paces, some were just finishing the

imaginary fish while some had written in journals, colored a dolphin

picture and a few had even gone on to work on books they were writing in

the creative writing center.

By now, an hour and a half indoors with a lot of other children

started to get the best of students, who ceased raising hands before

asking questions and began zipping around the room.

Outside they could hear the older students having a play day.

Time to refocus, they played their own version of “Jeopardy.” Both

teams won stickers.

Clearly, keeping the students in constant motion was Ortega’s only

hope.

The coloring, cutting and pasting of a tropical fish was the last

activity before, at the two-hour mark, they went bonkers.

Kevin A.J. Gil, 6, had certainly had enough as he did cartwheels that

turned into somersaults at the front of the room.

A couple games of squirrel in the tree -- a version of musical chairs

that has no music and requires running -- out on the grass used up some

energy and had them breaking a sweat.

“I’m hot,” said Parnac Nahidi, 6.

“I think my sticker’s melting,” said A.J. Dauenhauer, 6.

Perfect -- that meant it was time to throw on the green construction

paper grass skirts and head to the kindergarten luau. There, all the

kindergarten classes performed the Hukilau for teachers and parents

before enjoying a picnic lunch in the grass and saying goodbye to

teachers and classmates.