CRANSTON — Waterman Elementary School principal Don Cowart usually doesn’t have to do much shooing to clear the building at the end of the day.

But things were a bit different recently when the Pontiac Avenue school opened its doors to the community for a special program commemorating Waterman’s 80th birthday.

After some speeches and a few songs by the school chorus, hundreds of guests shared memories as they wandered the wide old corridors and lingered in classrooms while the sound system played hit songs from every year Waterman has been serving the neighborhood.

“It was like a living museum,” Cowart said of the Nov. 30 celebration. “We had teachers who used to work here, students from today, and people who had been students from as far back as the 1930s and earlier.”

Named for Daniel D. Waterman, a city clerk and School Committee member in the early 1900s, the school was built in the stalwart, four-square brick style of the era. At the time, “I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover” was at the top of the music hit parade.

Constructed to serve families who, for the most part, lived in the tidy neighborhoods on the east side of Pontiac Avenue, the Waterman has remained true to its roots and is the only elementary school left in the district which has no regular buses because all students live within walking distance. It has an enrollment today of nearly 300 students in kindergarten through fifth grade.

Its secure place in the heart of the community is demonstrated by the fact that many of the parents who are active in the Parents and Teachers of Waterman group are Waterman grads. “I went here and my father went here,” said Deb McKeon, head of the PTW. “It’s still a small neighborhood school and a great place for kids.”

“I think kids need to feel proud of where they go to school,” she said. “They spend six hours or more a day in school and it’s not just an academic place for them.”

Cowart said that he and the parents felt it was important to celebrate the 80th anniversary for a number of reasons. First of all, he said, it’s meaningful for youngsters to have a sense of community and educational heritage.

“We want to help them have an identity — to know their school and a sense of where they’ve come from,” Cowart said. “It’s something that’s particularly important when they move on to the middle school level. Recognizing the past helps them know who they are today and will help them feel grounded.”

Also, Cowart said, it was a good opportunity to weave local history into all aspects of the curriculum. The students did research for essays and sang songs the staff wrote for the occasion.

Their creative talents were challenged when they were asked to create portraits of what a gentleman of Daniel D. Waterman’s stature would look like in the 1920s, and they also joined in a collaborative with a local artists’ exchange to make ceramic tiles commemorating each decade the school has been in existence.

The students’ projects were among the many items on display, and one printed essay on wide-lined paper stated, “I like Waterman School because you get smarter. You can listen and bring books home with you. I feel happy and good and great because I get to learn a lot.”

Cowart and McKeon said that one of the most enjoyable aspects of planning the celebration was creating a recording of every top song for the past 80 years, including disco, doo-wop and hip-hop.

He said he was hoping for a good turnout on the evening of Nov. 30, but did not expect to see 300-plus people overflowing the school’s ground-floor cafeteria. At one point, he said, he called on graduates to stand up decade by decade until he got back to the ’30s when he went year by year. “We had someone there from 1938, 1935 and 1931,” he said. “But when a woman stood up who went here in 1929, just two years after the school opened, the audience went nuts.”

At the end of the evening, Cowart said it appeared no one was in any hurry to leave and he went from classroom to classroom gently ushering people along as they continued to share their remembrances. “The atmosphere was fantastic with everyone gathered in small groups sharing memories,” he said. “It was typical Waterman.”