Five for Friday {June 5}

It's been a long time since I linked up with Kasey from Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday.

This was my first "official" week of summer, though it included 2 mandatory professional development days through our district.  The first was a county workshop on play. The second day was spent exploring our new math curriculum, EngageNY/Eureka Math.  We eventually broke into teams and began to prep materials.  Below is my table after about 5 minutes of 3 of us working together.  This is a sign of progress, right?

One of the piles created at the above work day was "laminate at home".  Our laminator at school has flimsy laminating film, and there are just some things you want thicker.  I spent a few evenings this week laminating these things.

I love trying new recipes in the summer.  I found out about 6 weeks ago that I have a what allergy, so I am not on a gluten-free diet.  Thank goodness for Pinterest and Aldi, I am enjoying food.  A bakery near work is complete gluten-free.  I picked up these pizza crusts and tried making a veggie and cheese pizza last night.  It was yummy!  If you have any favorites, please share!

I've spent a few evenings this week at "VBS work nights."  Our church has work nights to prep materials and decorate in the time leading up to VBS.  We worked on cutting and building snowflakes for our "Everest" theme this week.  

Here's another item that I found in my cleaning purge over the last weeks of school.  I have 12 or so of these and am anticipating 18-20 kiddos next year.  I am willing to pick up a few more during sales this summer if you have a good use for a class set!

My first thought was some type of math manipulative could be stored in them.  We are switching to EngageNY/Eureka Math, and the thing I've learned so far is that there is a lot of "stuff."  Do you have ideas of how to use these slider cases?  Please share!

Keeping Busy This Summer

I wanted my kiddos to keep busy while having fun this summer.  I think it is important that they work on skills that we learned throughout the year, but I also know it needs to be fun or they won't do it.

I asked for suggestions in my last family survey (I do these monthly) for things families might like to see included.  Some suggestions were: science experiments, math games, books and questions to ask, writing paper.  I set to work gathering materials.

I packed everything in these gift bags that I found 5 for $2.  I added a little tag so I knew who each bag belonged to.

My first stop was our computer lab which doubles as our book room around the perimeter.  There are a few boxes of books in there that were "discards" from an old reading series or two.  The directions on the box said to use as prizes or giveaways for students.  I considered this a prize: you made it through kindergarten and have the opportunity to read over the summer.  These books were too easy for my highest kids, so I took enough to give my other kiddos 2 books per month over the summer (6 books each in total).  For my higher kids, I ordered appropriate texts from Scholastic using my bonus points.

These are the items that went into each bag.  A packet for each month (games and books in each packet), a little tool kit, magnifying glass, Highlights magazine, small playdoh, Smarties, a set of Tangrams, 3 bookmarks (one per month) and writing paper.

I next started scouring Pinterest for math games and science experiments that were easy to prep and did not involve a lot of materials.  The majority of our kiddos struggle financially, so I tried to find ideas using materials mostly found around the house.  If something was included that most people would not have, I generally included this material in the kit.

This is 1 month of activities for a student.  Tan are science experiments and purple are math games.

Finally, I added some writing paper, a box of crayons, a mechanical pencil, 2 dice and some counters.

Once I had everything gathered, I set up a little assembly line around a table to make the bags for each student. Their bag "name tags" are spread out on a table behind the table I took a picture of.  I then lined the completed bags up along the back wall of our room.  I did these the day before our last day so they weren't stored in an assembled form too long.

You can see the pile of books, envelopes for each month (they are already stuffed) and the various other materials for their bags.

This kind of doubled as their end of the year gift (in addition to the memory books we created together).  I hope that they will find some fun-filled ways to keep learning this summer.  Do you create summer packets for your students?  What do you include?

Graduation

My kiddos graduated from Kindergarten last Wednesday.  It was a bittersweet day for me as I loved this class!  Our graduation ceremony was on the kids' last day.

Our kiddos wear caps for graduation.  They are felt, and we purchase them through Oriental Trading.  Our school colors are red and blue so we have the choice for our team.  Below my kiddos are singing HeidiSongs while I did some last minute things before we headed to the ceremony.

Our ceremony takes place in the gym with 4 classes at a time.  Students enter and exit 2x2 to Pomp and Circumstance.  They sing a few songs and each child receives a diploma.  After the ceremony, parents are invited for a reception in another room.  Below you will see my kiddos looking at their memory books while waiting for families to come.

This year, because our graduation was on the last day of school, many of my students were heading home with their families to celebrate.  One of my friends was not ready to let kindergarten go, so she decided to hang out with her teacher for the day.  We got a lot of work done and had some fun too!

She made my cubby tags for next year.  The Ellison was her favorite.  

We had a picnic lunch complete with a selfie (taken by her).  It was a great last day!

I'll be back over the next couple weeks to share some things from our last few weeks of school.  This is a little backwards, but it is going to take me a little longer to get those posts together.

Find a Purpose Friday

I did a major purge in my classroom over the past week or so.  I'm not sure what brought it on, but oh so much clutter I'm sure had something to do with it!

I found some things that there has to be a good use for, so I'm starting a little mini series on Fridays sharing the items that need a project to go with them.  I'd love for you to share your ideas on how to use these things!  If there is interest, I think it would be fun to do a linky once a week throughout the month of June of things that you need to find a purpose for!  Please comment below if this is something you'd be interested in!

Here is my first item:

I found this bag of marbles in the depths of my closet, and other than marble painting, I don't know what do with them.  I teach full day kindergarten.  Any ideas?

On the Map

One of the topics my kiddos wanted to learn about in the month of May was maps.  They mentioned countries, states and maps and general.  Our music teacher taught them the 50 Nifty States song.  If you've been reading along for a while, you know that many of my kiddos are readers, and after learning this song, they found great joy in reading and finding the states they sang about on the map.  Thanks Mr. Smith!

I focused more on maps and why we need them.  We also did quite a bit with cardinal directions.  This tied in perfectly as we had 2 walking field trips during this time and talked about using a map to help us find our way.

We started off day 1 making a paper compass from Mrs. Payton's Map Skills pack.  We then took our compasses out on the playground and lined up facing North.  I called out directions such as "take 3 steps to the South" or "hop 5 hops to the East".  Students learned to turn and use their compasses quite quickly through this activity.  We smiled as we were talking to the library and a couple students yelled "We are walking East right now." and would alert us to the direction we were going as we made turns. Glad to see this lesson sunk in!

Students also worked in groups to create mazes, which tied beautifully into our next unit on games.  The mazes represented trying to get somewhere without a map.  It can be a 'maze' trying to find your way from one place to another, but maps are here to help us.  Thanks to my friend Em from Curious Firsties for picking up the straws for our mazes at IKEA!

We added a magnetic marble and a magnet to play with each group's maze.  This was a center activity that they loved!

Here are some of the books I found at the library and on Amazon for this unit:

Unofficial Start of Summer

Memorial Day weekend is here; where did the year go?!?  The kiddos I had in third grade my second year of teaching are graduating today (makes me feel old!) and my current crew of kiddos graduates from kindergarten Wednesday.  Wednesday is also our last day of school for kids.  This year flew by!

My experience this year has been nothing short of amazing.  I love that my students have had the opportunity and desire to help others throughout the year and have grown in ways that a test score will not show.  I'm definitely sad to see this class go, but I look forward to seeing all they accomplish over the next several years.

On a fun note, get your summer started on the right foot by visiting my friend, Diane's, blog, Spreading Joy, One Giggle at a Time.  She recently had a blog redesign and is having a giveaway to celebrate.  Her social stories on TpT are great for K and 1st grade kiddos.

As we celebrate summer this Memorial Day weekend, thanks to all those heroes who have served our country and become the real reason we celebrate Memorial Day.

Food Pantry & Food Drive

One way we decided to help others as the school year is coming to a close is to run a building-wide food drive.

To prepare for the food drive, we walked to our community's food pantry for a tour and a peek at how things work.  One of our district employees is on the board at the food pantry, and she was gracious enough to lead the tour.  Prior to our visit, students created a list of questions they wanted to get answers to on our visit.  2 students volunteered to be our note-takers at the food pantry and 2 kiddos were our "official" photographers on our trip.

Students were immediately excited to see the freezer with ice cream in it and a volunteer who showed them the forklift in action.

After learning about how the food pantry works and what their needs are, we set to work organizing our food drive.  A couple classrooms allowed students to visit and share what we learned.  A group of students created an iMovie movie trailer to share their knowledge of the food pantry with others.  Our last group created the flyer to send home to all students explaining our food drive.

We were learning about measurement in math, so we put our measurement skills to work to decide how to set a goal for our food collection.  We decided that weight was a better idea than length.  We set a goal of 400 pounds of food since we have just over 400 students in our building.

Our food drive ran for a week.  It was shared via our school district's social media pages as well as in our local newspaper's "chalkboard chatter" section.  At the end of the week, we weighed the food collected and sorted it into groups because the kids wanted to count how many items we had too.

We are happy to report that we collected 413 pounds of food!  My kiddos were so excited to meet our goal and help others in our community!

The final part of our project was a representative from the food pantry coming to pick up the food.  5 of the kids helped him load our collection into his vehicle.  He made it fun for them by allowing them to ride on the cart on the way back up the hallway.  They couldn't get enough of it!

This was a great project for a class and was well-supported by families.  My kiddos have looked forward to helping others throughout this year.  I hope it is something that they will want to do in the future as well!