Field Day

Well, we survived Field Day. Although I was exhausted when I got home and I didn't even play any of the games! A 90-degree Texas day will do that to you I guess. The kiddos had a blast and of course, that's the important thing. 

My 2nd favorite part of the day was a comment made by one of my students. We put a vest on the last person on each team so when they lined back up we could see where the end was. One of my boys volunteered and I told him he was our "ringer". A few minutes later I overheard him tell another student that she couldn't line up behind him because he was the "ring bearer"! How cute is that.

My favorite part--look what one of my wonderful parents made for the students:

Isn't that just too cute! I'm not even sure how she did it and I know it must have taken some time to put together. Love my parents!

Advice for Upcoming Kinders

Can you believe I have made over 450 posts on my little 'ole blog! Who knew several years ago when I started that I would still be going and it would still be such an important thing to me.

Anyway, one of our writing assignments last week was to write a letter to the Pre-K kiddos coming up with advice on how to handle Kindergarten. The first one is my favorite :) :

Save the drama for your llama! 

Where do they get these things?! They've been around me too long! :)

You should not give up writing, just ask somebody to help.

Remember you are going to be good. You are going to know your high frequency words and read to each other.

You have better lines than we have (he's talking about in the hallway-I always say that) and you are setting an example.

You must be a good listener and don't give up...

Do not forget to be awesome. Be creative by good answers. You have to work hard and do the best that as you can.

You should know that when you go to the new classroom, don't cry if your teacher does not look the same. :)

Good-bye Gifts

Don't you just love this time of year (I know you can't see me rolling my eyes! :). I was literally unable to sleep last night just thinking of all the things I was supposed to get done this weekend: grading EOY assessments to calculate growth, filling in certificates for our awards at the end of the week, burning 26 CD's of the videos I've taken this year (although I left my slideshow file at school :( . And I'm really trying not to even think about the packing up my room for the 3rd time in 4 years! We usually pack everything up so they can clean-but I have to even empty cabinets and closets this time since I'm moving to a new room next year. *Sigh*.

This part is the fun stuff! We really don't see many people retire from our campus. People move on to other locations or move up the ladder and become administrators. However, this year we have 2 beloved staff members retiring. One is our PE teacher and another has the affectionate moniker of  "Grandma"--- she works in our cafeteria. She goes out of her way to greet my kiddos every day, so I wanted to do something special. I couldn't decide what to do for them and then was struck with a little inspiration (don't you love when that happens! :).

We ended up making these:

We did the handprints on both sides and the kids signed their names on the bags. I think they came out really cute.

Looking Ahead

I didn't want to start talking about the school year ending too soon, because I know the students start to check out mentally when that happens. Although, this year, they just seemed to know anyway. We've been talking about the next school year and ways to help practice skills this summer so we don't lose any of that valuable learning.

I know there are tons of these out there right now, lots of templates. But those that know me know I'm not a template-kind-of-gal! I just opened the cabinet of paper and told them to make themselves as a graduate and write about their plan for 1st Grade.

Being Awesome

I saw this clip recently at a training, I know many people have probably seen this kiddo before, the video seems to be everywhere-I shared it with my students the other day-they loved it:

The part about Robert Frost was just perfect because we did that poem this year so my kids really got that joke! Anyway his message, among other things, is be awesome. So I asked my kids to write about what they were going to do to make the world awesome!

I do tell them to think outside the box! :)

Sell money :)

So what are you going to do so you can stop being boring and be awesome?

Inventing Dinosaurs

Another unit I like to do just for fun at the end of the year is dinosaurs. I'm not sure why kids are so fascinated with them, but they had lots of questions. We talked about the rules of dinosaurs and what every dino has as traits. Then I asked them to invent their own dinosaur using those rules--some did meat-eaters, some plant-eaters, but they all came out pretty creatively!