PCES fourth grade receives unique opportunity

The hustle and bustle of the holiday season made it into the fourth-grade classrooms of Phil Campbell Elementary School the week after Thanksgiving as students prepared for a special field trip. More then 100 ornaments and 50 T-shirts were made by the students in just three days. Nov. 30 they donned the special shirts, loaded up the handcrafted ornaments and headed to the Alabama state capital.

PCES students had a special role to play upon arriving at the capitol building. The school had received a call Nov. 21 asking them to visit the capitol and decorate one of the Christmas trees there, according to Principal Jackie Ergle.

“It was a little chaotic getting everything ready on such short notice, but the kids were so excited,” fourth-grade teacher Tina Swinney said.

For one of the ornaments, Swinney said, students made Christmas trees out of popsicle sticks and strips of sheets of music to “represent the musical history of the area.” One of the other ornaments was a wooden cutout of the state of Alabama with a heart painted in the North West corner.

“Each child made one of each, so we had 100, plus the pinecone ornaments,” Swinney said.

Fourth-grade teacher Tracey Cook said they decorated longleaf pinecones because they are the designated tree of Alabama.

These ornaments now bedeck a 7.5-foot tree in the capitol, one of four trees that were decorated by selected groups.

“We’re very honored to have been chosen for this,” Cook said.

This is only the third year a school has been chosen to decorate one of the trees, and Ergle said PCES was selected because Alabama’s Secretary of State John Merrill’s wife attended PCES. In the previous two years, Merrill chose the school he attended and the school at which his wife taught and was a principal.

It was more than just a fun field trip for the students. The teachers said they spent extra time teaching the students more details about the government and the capital before the trip.

“We made a book about the capital with details about it that they would remember so they would have stuff to look forward to when they go there,” fourth-grade teacher Juliann Riley said.

Teachers said that preparation paid off.

“You could see their eyes light up and feel the excitement rising as they recognized things from what they had studied,” Cook said.

None of it would have been possible, Ergle said, without support and funding from Community Spirit Bank and Superintendent Greg Hamilton.