At St James Primary School in Muswellbrook, they do Father’s Day celebrations a bit differently.
Following the traditional Liturgy, families are invited to join their kids in a paper plane flying competition on the schools oval.
“We’re big on community here at St James and this is just something that everybody can get invested in, it’s a bit of an equalizer,” Renee Gavin, learning support teacher, said of the activity that started five years ago when Aaron Moon joined the school as principal.
“There’s no right or wrong way to do it, everybody knows how to build a paper plane.”
While some families take it very seriously, practising at home and working out the best way to engineer a piece of paper into an aviation marvel, others just make their plane on the day and hope for the best.
Each class take their turn up on the runway, with the students followed by their fathers having a go, with the furthest flight in each stage taking out the trophy.
There was no shortage of laughs, like when a wayward craft looped back behind the launch site and around the hall – it has yet to be recovered, or when a spiralling acrobatic plane got up close to onlookers on the ground.
“Our motto here is learn laugh and have fun, and this is the fun part of it,” Mrs Gavin beamed.