Good Morning Summer!! End of the Year Activities (Chapter 3- Emergent Readers)

Jenn from Rowdy in First Grade has posted some great thoughts about Chapter 3 of our Guiding Readers book study- Guiding Emergent Readers.





Please head on over to read what she is saying. I really enjoyed reading through her post and seeing things through the eyes of a first grade teacher. As I have never taught such small people, it was interesting to learn about guided reading from Jenn's perspective. 

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I am FINALLY on summer break. It seems like the end of the school year took forever to get here, especially since I have been reading all our your posts about vacations, Made It Mondays, sleeping in...and gasp, back to school shopping?? How can 2 countries that are so close together have such vastly different school schedules?

The last week of school was both fun and stressful. I'm not sure if I have ever mentioned it before but my school is waaaaaaay over-capacity. We have a building built for 675 students and our current population is close to 1300!! So, that means we have something like 20+ portables (trailers) outside the main building. Being this big presents a whole lot of unique challenges for the staff, and come report card time life just got CRAZY! But, everything was sorted out, report cards went home (a day behind schedule!) and we made it through the year.

Here are some things my class and I did to celebrate the end of the year.

Stephanie from Teaching in Room 6 posted about these great goodbye posters her students made for a staff member that was leaving her school and I just loved how they looked. I decided that I wanted to do a smiler project with my Grade 4's because we had been studying perspective in art and language so it would be a good "curricular" tie-in for the last week of school. 

Each student traced their hand and then drew themselves "waving goodbye to Grade 4". In the speech bubbles we wrote all the things we would miss about Grade 4. They turned out super cute, I think! Thanks to Stephanie for such a great idea.

We also made masks (it was an artsy week). We used tinfoil (three layers) to create an outline of our faces and then paper macho went on top. They dried overnight and then the painting fun could start!

These were a few of my favourites.

Lastly, we converted one of our bulletin boards into a Twitter board and we updated our "status" based on the activities we did during the day. I loved it and am thinking I would like to find a way to use it all year in my class...like an exit ticket activity?

How did you end off your school year?