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The Red Top’s in-school, hands-on museum, Kidzeum, recently wrapped up its annual escape room challenge for third graders. The staff modeled the escape room on a town that featured a park, a library, a bakery and a campsite. Students divided into teams of five to eight and solved different puzzles in each room. They had 35 minutes to escape, and the team in each class that finished the quickest won an ice cream party.

Now classes in PreK-3 have started to visit the Kidzeum for the last exhibit of the semester, “Bodacious Bubbles.”

Williams said the kids all wear aprons due to the large number of bubbles they encounter at the various stations around the museum.

On January 24, public education advocates, pre-K champions, government officials, and the Mississippi Department of Education, celebrated 10 years of transformative high-quality pre-K in Mississippi.

The event at the State Capitol included a proclamation from the Governor, recognition of pre-K legislative leaders, and a public art installation representing more than 26,000 four-year-olds served in Mississippi over the last 10 years.

Grenada School District’s Learning Blocks collaborative contributed to this statewide recognition by creating a butterfly garden to represent 100 students at Grenada Elementary and 75 in Head Start who are currently being served by Grenada’s collaborative. 

Approximately 30 teachers at Grenada Elementary PreK-3 seized the momentum of a national movement called “Rock Your School.” The choose-your-own-theme day encourages teachers and administrators to think outside the box and find new ways of presenting their everyday classroom lessons.

The Rock Your School event, which has become an annual tradition at the Red Top, is a way to give kids a break from the norm and to inspire teachers to find creative approaches to their teaching standards. “It’s neat to see what the come up with each year,” Principal Cole Surrell said. “They put in a lot of work to make the day special and even bring in help and donations from the community.”

The Red Top’s popular holiday event, Grandparents Day, returned this year after two years’ absence. On Dec. 1 and 2, grandparents of students in Pre-K through third grade spent time with their little ones shopping at the book fair and touring a Swedish holiday exhibit in the Kidzeum.

The popular event is the culmination of the Kidzeum’s holiday exhibit, which introduces students to the holiday traditions of a different culture each year.

Red Top students learned many Swedish Christmas traditions, some of which are similar to American customs.

Tuesday, February 22, 2022 — or “Twosday,” as this once-in-a-lifetime palindrome date became known — was the deadline for a canned food drive at Grenada Elementary’s Red Top school. It was a day to celebrate the number two, but one class of second graders ended up celebrating a lot more than that.

Over the course of a week, each homeroom class at the Red Top amassed cans with the incentive of their special reward for the class that brought the most. When the mountain of cans was finally assembled, administrators counted more than 5,000. 

Surrell said that second-grade math teacher Tasha Lemley’s homeroom class brought in the most cans. 

Students at Grenada Elementary Pre-K-3 tried their hands at engineering and coding this semester at Kidz Tech, the cutting-edge addition to the Red Top’s beloved Kidzeum. 

Director Melanie Williams devoted several weeks to letting students play and build while teaching them beginner-level computer programming. Williams said the kids loved devoting an entire visit to the smart toys and devices at Kidz Tech.

The Kidzeum’s next exhibit opened in mid-February. Students will make multiple visits throughout the spring to learn about inclined planes, wedges, pulley systems, levers, and screws in a brand-new exhibit entitled Simple Machines. Here they learn the fundamental principles of physics by using classic, everyday tools that help multiply force to move objects.