End of Year Celebration!


Today was our End of Year Celebration! I had 15 of my 20 parents/families attend and we had a great time. I started by handing out our fun class awards (thank you Reagan!). Aren't they adorable? My kiddos just LOVED coming up to get their awards!

Then my kiddos got the gifts my mom and her BFF sent from California. I teach in a very rural and economically disadvantaged area so my mom and her BFF have become the "room moms" and send boxes upon boxes of goodies for my kiddos throughout the year. It has been such a blessing! 
Each kiddo got a bucket with a Word World DVD, Word World stickers, and pictures from throughout the year. 


They also each got 2 summer fun bags! One bag had all sorts of fun activities like puzzles, coloring books, jump ropes, etc and the other bag had books. Between this and the summer homework, my kiddos should be busy this summer!

Such cute bags! 
All kinds of fun!

What 6 year old doesn't love Max and Ruby?

Books, books, and more books! 

At the end of our celebration I played the DVD I made for the parents and families. Last year it took me what seemed like 20 hours to put together and this year I had created it and burned 20 DVDs in 2 hours! That left me time to make these super cute DVD labels...

Link up at


 
and 


 to share your end of year celebrations!

Off to plan some super fun activities for the last 2 days with my little scholars!
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End of the Year

I can't believe its been a week, friends! Last week went by so quickly. Our kiddos performed the Will.i.am song "What I Am" at our May Day program on Friday. I missed the program and field day because my boyfriend had LASIK surgery in Nashville. I steered clear of the internet last week, afraid I would google LASIK horror stories. He made it through with no complications and now has 20/20 vision! How amazing technology is!

I only have 4 days left with my kiddos...I can't believe it! We have our class end of year celebration on Tuesday and I am busy preparing for that. I'm finishing up my DVD, student awards, and other goodies. I'll post more tomorrow once I've got it all complete. It makes me so sad to think of saying goodbye to my kiddos who I've grown to love so much! 

To celebrate this last week of school and since I know we are trying to find anything and everything to keep our kiddos busy so we can finish assessing and all the other end of year fun, I am having a sale in my TpT shop. You can get my 159 page Beach Math and Literacy Station Pack for just $4. Most of the Common Core aligned activities are available in color AND black and white, so you just print and you're ready to go! 



I'll be back tomorrow with a peek at my end of year celebration gifts! 

Have a sweet Sunday, friends! 
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Happy Friday, friends! I don't think I've ever been happier to see a Friday. In search of a great song to perform to for our May Day Play Day program, I asked y'all for some ideas. We're going with this great little number from Will.i.am and our friends on Sesame Street. Thank you so much for sharing your ideas!


I totally spaced on giving away my Beach Math and Literacy Packet to 2 friends...so here goes!


Danielle and Katie you should have an email in your inbox :) 

Have a fabulous weekend, y'all! 

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State Testing Day 3...We Survived!

Let's talk about how exhausting this week has been and I'm not even the one taking the tests! The kiddos and I are restless and I cannot wait to get back to our normal routine complete with recess and our amazing assistant back in our class. Tomorrow is Friday (hooray!) but also my bus duty day where I arrive at school at 6:45 (boo!).

I'm late to this party, but I linked up with
 
for the May currently. This may or may not be the second currently where I have used the word "bossy." Anyone noticing a theme here? :) 


I've been thinking of adding a few more literacy activities to my Beach Math and Literacy Packet...any suggestions? I'd love your input!

Happy [almost] Friday, y'all!  


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State Testing Day 2

I survived another day without my dear assistant and without a break until 3:30pm. I will be so glad to see Friday this week! While nothing noteworthy happened today, I do want to share some of our writing from last week. My sweet teacher friend across the hall did this with her kiddos and I thought it was too cute! We started by reading the book
 
where the dog, Tucker, runs all over the house and makes a big mess. We then talked about what would happen if Tucker came to our school. (My kiddos love to talk about dogs as I am somehow always working my two pups, Jackson and Duncan into our lessons!) I created a story starter template and the kiddos let their imaginations run wild. 


...he will chew our rug and he will knock over our books. 

Tucker had knocked down the books. I was sad. Bad Tucker. Bad, bad, bad. 

Its so incredible to reflect on the growth our budding authors have made this year! 

In other news, I finally uploaded my Beach Math and Literacy Packet to TpT. I spent hours figuring out other ways to compress files than zipping them and somehow made it work! If you're a Mac user, you just open the PDF file using Preview, and click "Save As" and select "Reduce File Size" from the Quartz drop-down menu. So easy! Although the ginormous TpT sale is over, mine is not! You can grab the 159 page packet for just $4 until tomorrow. I made nearly all of the activities available in color AND black and white. Save that color ink! Can I get an amen?

Just click the picture to take you to my TpT shop! 

Have a good evening y'all! :) 
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State Testing Day 1

Yesterday I made my stage debut as one of Gladys Knight's Pips (yes, pip, no m in the word!) for our Soul Train program. I'm no thespian, but we still managed to have a good time and get the upper grade kiddos excited about the state test. They started the state testing today and used all the kindergarten assistant teachers to help proctor. I was without my wonderful, amazing, hardworking, keeps me in check assistant all.day.long. Because some of the sweet 6th graders were still taking the test at 2:00, we had to forego specials. I was with my kiddos and without even a minute break from 7:30-3:50 today and that includes lunch. (Who else enjoys their lunch alongside their kiddos on a daily basis?) Needless to say, I am absolutely exhausted. I don't know how you teachers without assistants do it!

We were having all kinds of beach fun from my Beach Math and Literacy Packet to try and keep the kiddos engaged while I tried to teach taught small group reading and math. With only two weeks left of school, we are doing a ton of review activities.

 The kiddos made patterns on the pocket chart. 
 They had fun at Base Ten Beach! 
Initial consonant clip with recording sheet. 


The best part about my Beach Math and Literacy Pack is that almost all activities are in color AND black and white! So you can save that color ink! I 'm having major difficulties uploading it to TpT! Its over 140 pages and apparently that is just too big for TpT even though I zipped the file. Should I separate them into Math and Literacy Packs? Or just remove some of the activities? I'll let you know when I upload it :)



Now, sweet friends I need your help! Our kinder kiddos will be performing in our May Day Play Day program and we need a song we can dance to. Last year we danced to "Cowboy Dance" by Jack Hartman. Do you have an end of the year program? What's your favorite song/dance your kiddos perform? To thank you for your ideas, I'll randomly select 2 friends to receive my Beach Math and Literacy Pack for f-r-e-e in 24 hours :)



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Teacher Appreciation Week!

I was at the Beale St. Music Festival all weekend so I feel quite out of the loop and have lots of blogging to catch up on! I did want to let you know about the Teacher Appreciation Sale that Teachers Pay Teachers is having. If you use the code TAD12 at checkout, you can save an additional 10% off at  checkout. Although I have way more for free than for sale in my store (nothing's wrong with that, right?!), everything in my store  is 20% off until Wednesday! I'm also finishing up my end of year beach station pack that I should be posting by tonight. Click the picture below to go to my TpT store :)
 
Thank you Erica Bohrer for the graphic! 



Happy Teacher Appreciation Week!





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Update....It's a long one!

My oh my friends,  it's been a while. We only have 16 days of school left so we are busy with all the end of the year fun. My kiddos were assessed on DIBELS last week and we'll begin the math summative assessment next week. With all this assessment going on, my kiddos have a lot more independent time so I've been creating activities for them to review all the skills they've learned this year.
The Sandy Syllables sort that we completed together.

The Sandy Syllables book they completed independently.

We counted the sounds in words and sorted them by number of sounds. 

My kiddos completed their own sound count book independently. 


They measured using non-standard units of measure....beach balls!

 They worked more with ten frames. 

Notice the beach theme? Can you tell I'm getting excited for summer?!

Our high-stakes test for 3rd-6th graders is next week so we've had a Spirit Week to get everyone pumped! Tuesday was Crazy Sock Day and I bought these gems for my assistant and I.
Its a blurry picture...but can you see the alligator teeth and flamingo beak? Too cute! 

Monday is the finale, our Soul Train program. All the teachers have to make fools of themselves perform. In the next 4 days I have to learn how to dance like they did on Soul Train. I'm an 80s baby so I know nothing about the 70s or Soul Train (that's when it was on, right?) and I have no rhythm, I mean can't even do the cha cha slide...this ought to be hilarious!

Okay, it wasn't so long after all. I'll be back tomorrow with an update on Writer's Workshop. Happy Wednesday y'all!


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