Salley Cat Reports: Cleaning up the Playground

By Salley Cat

Hey – it’s Salley Cat! When we got back to Kinzville Academy, Mrs. Cowoline put out an emergency call for volunteers for a Playground Cleanup Crew. She said over the summer lots of Kinzville residents used the playground for soccer games, picnics and just hanging out, and when Mrs. Cowoline realized how much trash and litter they behind, she knew it was too much for her to handle on her own so she decided she’d call on some of us to help her out with the clean up.

Mrs. Cowoline told us to wear hats and sunglasses, and she gave us all sunscreen to put on before we started. She had checked over the playground carefully to make sure that she picked up anything dangerous like broken glass before we got started. After that she split us up into teams of two and gave us each a pair of work gloves, and one garbage bag per team. Stoogles and I were a team. One of us is held the bag while the other one picked up the litter. Mrs. Cowoline sent each team to a different part of the playground so we wouldn’t be in each other’s way.

Stoogles and I made a game of it. We took turns holding the bag and then Stoogles would use his watch to time each of us. The one who picked up the most pieces of trash on their turn won. Stoogles and I were having so much fun we had cleaned up all the litter in no time!

Then Stoogles saw something shiny in the grass and when he went to pick it up it was a necklace! It looked really fancy – it had a pretty stone on it that looked like a diamond! It was so beautiful! We took it to Mrs. Cowoline and she said that she would check and see if anyone had reported it missing.

After we finished we went inside for some lemonade and apple slices in the cafeteria. We were all pretty hot and exhausted, but when we went back outside and saw how much better the playground looked, we agreed it was worth it.

And then later in the day, Mrs. Cowoline came back to us and told us that the necklace we found belonged to Ms. Birdy. She was really happy to have it back because it had been a gift from a special friend of hers (Stoogles thinks it’s Dr. Quack) and she lost it one day when they were on a picnic. She was so relieved that she gave us each 10 Kinzcash for finding it! So after school, Stoogles and I decided to take all the Clean Up Volunteers out for ice cream.

What a day! I sure am tired, but it was a great day – we cleaned up the playground, discovered lost treasure, got a reward AND had ice cream. It doesn’t get much better than that!