First days of school can be equal parts exciting and formulaic. Students show up in new outfits and with fresh supplies, seeing which friends are in their classes. Teachers pore over class rules and syllabi. Textbooks might get broken out as first lessons get underway.

But things look a little different than that business-as-usual approach at Evergreen School District.

It was Superintendent Laurie Barron who came up with what is now dubbed as “A Day” at Evergreen. Evergreen Junior High School Principal Jennifer Doss said “A Day” has now been a district-wide tradition for more than a decade.

The idea: rather than go over class rules or a syllabus, teachers are charged with coming up with an activity to make the first day of school fun and engaging, Doss said. Activities don’t necessarily need to relate to a teacher’s content area. Many teachers select team building activities, though Doss said activities in the past have run the gamut from spending time outside to first day of school dissections. 

At the middle school Wednesday morning, students held “fortune teller fish” in their hands in Vic Dalla Betta’s seventh grade science class. He told them to make up their own experiment to determine why the fish moved when placed in the palm of their hand. Was it static electricity? Sweaty palms? Students’ heartbeats?

Down the hall, in Chris Peterson’s science class, students constructed towers out of raw spaghetti noodles (pictured above). Their goal: to work as a team to make a tower as tall as possible, while also being able to support the weight of a marshmallow.

“If it’s not working, how do you do it different?” Peterson asked his students. He said they’d be talking the next day about what they learned, and how they learned it.

One middle school social studies teacher had students working on puzzles, but they had to rotate and build on another group’s work every few minutes.

At East Evergreen Elementary School, students colored in crowns for their first day of kindergarten and took pictures to send home to their parents. Second graders got to know each other through a “Find Someone Who” activity, while first graders colored worksheets declaring that they “survived” their first day.

While Doss acknowledges it may seem strange to operate without rules on the first day, she said diving straight into the year with an exciting activity can ease the first day stress some students might experience. It also showcases what can happen throughout the year when students are eager to learn.

“The kids know to be respectful and responsible,” Doss said.

Evergreen School District welcomed students back to the building Wednesday, along with Helena Flats, Whitefish, Kalispell Public Schools and Smith Valley School. The district joined Cayuse Prairie, Fair-Mont-Egan and Pleasant Valley welcoming students back this week.

Most of the valley’s other school districts — including Bigfork, Columbia Falls and West Valley — will see students returning to their buildings next Tuesday or Wednesday.

For this Daily Roundup author, Mariah Thomas, the Flathead Beacon’s education reporter, the return to school marks a ramp-up to a busier time of year — but an exciting time too.

And watching students at Evergreen getting excited to learn was the perfect way to kick off my first school year in the Flathead Valley.

“This is the funnest period ever,” declared a seventh grader working on a puzzle in Pam Doty’s social studies class.

Now, the rest of your Daily Roundup.

Meet Venus, an adorable border collie mix available for adoption. This puppy is just about three months old, and if she gets snatched up, the Humane Society has several other border collie mixes around the same age (I can only assume they might be her siblings) ripe for adoption too.

To find out more about Venus and other pet adoption opportunities at the Humane Society of Northwest Montana go to: www.humanesocietypets.com. To donate to the Humane Society of Northwest Montana, visit the organization’s donation page here.