Tea Time in Dodson

Dodson Public School hosted a Mother's Day tea party last Thursday which featured live music, dancing, food, and fun as students and staff welcomed mothers and grandmothers for a special celebration.

"I'd like to thank all the parents for coming out to this event today and supporting our children and our school," Dodson School's Superintendent Gary Weitz said. "It is wonderful to see so many people here today and we have a wonderful program in store for you all."

The day's event was held in the school cafeteria with each table topped with table clothes and flowers; the reader boards decorated with colorful papers proclaiming, "Mothers and Grandmothers are Tea-rrific;" and white lights bejeweled potted trees adding to the garden ambiance. As for refreshments, egg salad and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, cake and several different types of beverages were to be had.

Leading off the day's entertainment, Kyla Messerly's high school band class played an original song on their Native American Flutes. Following the high school girls was Mrs. Messerly's elementary and middle school music classes singing the song You Can Count on Me Like 1 2 3 composed by Bruno Mars. Mrs. Messerly's eighth-grade boys had spent the last few months learning how to do the two-step and showed their dancing prowess on the day as members of the audience joined the young men in cutting a rug. Amber Azure's sixth-grade students followed the dancing with original poems written for their mothers. Following the poems, each of the elementary classes gave their mothers and grandmothers gifts, ranging from small potted plants to framed photographs of themselves.

Ahead of the event, members of Mrs. Charity Hebert's second and third-grade class busied themselves wrapping the pictures they would soon bestow on their mothers and grandmothers. Maleaha Messerly, a second-grade student, said mothers and grandmothers mean everything to her.

"They are nice and my grandma cooks for me and does my laundry," she said. "She is pretty and she goes to work every day so she can take care of me."

Kaiya Doney, also in the second grade, said that she appreciates that her mother cooks and takes care of her and her baby sister.

"We are going to take my mom bowling," Doney said of her plans for her mother on Mother's Day.

Kyra Campbell, a third grader, said she is grateful that her grandmother cares for her and her favorite memory of her grandmother is the time they went to Billings for the day.

"She took us shopping and out to eat," Campbell remembered.