This year was Monhegan's turn to host the annual Inter-Island Event! What is Inter-Island Event, (or as we call it IIE) you ask? It is only the most spectacular event that involves the five Down East outer islands one and two room schools! Each year a different island hosts the event and invites teachers, students, and parents from the other participating schools to their island for 24 hours of pure fun and chaos. When I agreed last Spring to organized this years event I knew it was going to be A LOT of work, especially with only two kids to help, but little did I realize how much fun we were going to have!
As soon as school started in September we hit the ground running preparing for the big event. We had lots of scheduling, organizing, and planning to do. We created a virtual notebook online for schools to view our plans and sign up for different elements of the event which was very helpful. The boys were SO enthusiastic about all the planning which made it all the more fun. It was nice to have the IIE to focus on at the beginning of the year because it is hard to keep things fun and fresh at the beginning of a year with two brothers who you have happened to have taught for the last three years!
Along with all the planning and scheduling we needed to do we also had some creative projects we wanted to complete in time for IIE.
The first project was to create a mural in our school of a map of the coast of Maine that showcased the five outer islands that would be present at IIE.
The five outer islands we are talking about are: Monhegan, Matinicus, Isle Au Haut, Frenchboro, and Islesford (which is also known as Little Cranberry Island!)
We used magazine clippings, paint, sparkles, and lots of glue to jazz up the mural and show our community of islands.
The finished product was awesome and it was such a great backdrop for our IIE!
Our next creative project to work on was to tie-dye bandanas that we would use for capture the flag at IIE. 
Capture the Flag is a HUGE tradition at IIE! These island kids do not get many opportunities to play games with 20+ kids so you can see the reasoning behind such excitement for a pretty simple field game!
Can you guess which area of the table was Quinn's? He takes after his messy teacher.
We hung our gorgeous bandanas outside to dry. We made enough for team blue...
and team red!
We planned on having kids pick bandanas from a bag to keep the teams fair and random. We also planned on having people sign each other's bandanas at the end of IIE and then people would have a special IIE souvenir to take with them!
Thank goodness we had Anne around for IIE preparations! We needed all the help we could get!
One of our final creative projects was to make name-tags out of pieces of (Monhegan) wood that our dear friend Rusty cut up for us. Quinny drilled the holes, and we strung the wood with some yarn and wrote "IIE 2010" on the back of all the wood. We planned on using these necklaces as name-tags for the event and then the kids could keep them as another souvenir! I have to say I LOVE souvenirs!
Next year, IIE t-shirts!?
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