Cowboy up: Kindergartners get a real Old West experience Defying the clichéd saying, it actually was their first rodeo. All eight kindergarten classes at Lydia Rippey Elementary celebrated "Cowboy Day" on Wednesday. The students, most clad in western attire and cowboy hats, rotated between four themed activity stations. The classes took turns making western art, racing stick horses, learning the basics of rodeo and listening to campfire tales. A culmination of weeks of schoolwork, Cowboy Day was held in lieu of a Halloween festival at Lydia Rippey. The kindergartners have used the cowboy theme in most aspects of their recent studies, incorporating it in math problems, crafts, writing and story time. Kindergarten teacher and Cowboy Day coordinator Ione Randleman is seeing the results. "They've been reading all these cowboy books, and we keep hearing them say the vocabulary. It's really starting to click," she said. Volunteers from the Aztec High School Future Farmers of America, the Four Corners Rodeo Team and the 4-H Club were on hand to teach the kindergartners how to lasso, barrel race, ride bareback and sit in a saddle bronc saddle. Aztec Feed and Supply provided most of the rodeo equipment. The enthralled children were more than willing participants....