Winding down should mean less to do....

Let me pretend I'm from the south for a minute....

Ohmiword!!!!!  

Where have I been and what in the world have I been doing?????

Ok, back to being an upstate New Yorker- (but secretly, I wish I could pull off that southern drawl because it is so fun).  

You know it's the end of the school year when.......

YOU HAVE MORE ON YOUR TO DO LIST THAN YOU HAVE DAYS LEFT!!!!

I know I'm not alone (although, some of you out there are already into your summer vacation and I am J-E-A-L-O-U-S!!!).  But even those of you who are already done, surely your last month or so of school was just as crazy, right?  So here's a laundry list of what I've been doing for the last month (yes, it's been a month since I posted last :-(  

-Assessments

-School Fair (which is a district-wide open house in our High School)

-Meetings, and lots of them

-Assessments

-Planning a Character Education Assembly (it was my turn)

-Assessments

-Creating next year's class lists

-Assessments

-APPR paperwork

-RTI paperwork

-Student portfolios

-Scoring assessments

AND

-Report Cards

.....did I mention Assessments????

We have 9 days left of school and I am still finishing up those last few at the bottom of my list.  So as I sit here surrounded by piles of papers, I thought, Hmmmmm, maybe I should take a minute and write a little bit about winding down on my first year teaching first grade.  

Here is quick look at what I put up for our School Fair.  I also made a slideshow with pictures from the whole year, but can't put that on here.  It's great when it's all up on display, but it is A LOT of work!!!

For our Character Education Assembly I made an i-Movie wrapping up the 4 key points of our program this year, which is from Rachel's Challenge.  For those of you who do not know, Rachel's Challenge is a group that comes to schools to propose ideas of how we can make our schools a better place to be.  Rachel Scott was the first victim in the Columbine school shootings.   The four challenges are: Use Kind Words, Do Nice Things, Include Others, and Start a Chain Reaction.  If you have never heard of it, I encourage you to click on the link above and read more about it.  It was really amazing!!!! I can't really show you the movie I made though, because I don't have permission from everyone in it.  It included pictures and videos of our whole school.  It came out great, but I am happy it is over now :-)

So, since the rest of my list is not at all picture worthy (who wants to see pictures of assessments, RTI, and APPR???) - I will show you a little of what we have planned for our last month.  I had found on Pinterest a while ago how some Kindergarten classrooms wrap up the end of the year by reviewing a letter a day and tie it into something fun, like B is for beach day or C is for class campout.  Since first graders are beyond single letter sounds (hopefully ;-), I decided to do the same thing but by reviewing some of the letter combinations and vowel teams that we have worked on throughout they year.  

So far we have made it through our first week on this calendar.  

Silent e Day was so fun!!!  We read joke books and the kids got to tell their favorite jokes.  We all laughed a lot that day!  We did some review centers and activities with telling time and also played What time is it Mr. Fox?  outside.  We also played other games like Red Rover, and Red Light, Green Light.

Tuesday (ai day) we went for a walk on our Nature Trail out back.  

Tootie Fruitie Day - Wednesday was the kid's (and my) favorite!  We all brought in our favorite fruits.  Then we graphed them.  I brought in a whole bunch of different fruits and we had some taste testing.  The best part was making smoothies!!!  We had two blenders going and mixed a whole bunch of fruit together.  The flavors we sampled were: Strawberry Raspberry Banana, Strawberry Kiwi, Blueberry Peach, Blueberry Strawberry Orange, and finally Tootie Fruitie, which was a mix of everything - strawberry, raspberry, blueberry, watermelon, orange, banana, peach, kiwi, and mango.  It was quite tasty!! It was a hectic day so I don't have pictures - sorry :(

Thursday was our Character Ed Assembly and our school Festival at night.  Unfortunately it rained so the festivities were all inside, but we still had a great turn out!

Finally, Friday was Show and Tell.  I had a math training all day for Singapore Math so I wasn't there for that one and I REALLY wish I was.  I'm sure the kids were so excited!!!  

Next week should be equally as fun with our Zoo field trip and Field Days.  On Monday, we will discuss our goals we made back in September and see how well we did to achieve them.  We will also be playing a kickball game against the other 1st grade class.  Thursday is a school-wide assembly to honor our volunteers.  We will also take some time to talk about our peers and nominate each other for classroom awards.  Awards will be given out at our party.  

I hope you will all be sticking around this summer, because I hope to be better with the blogging and looking for tons more interesting ideas that I can implement next year.  I plan on getting on Instagram (I'm actually on it but haven't done anything yet).  I also need to sort through my pins on Pinterest and see what ideas I want to find or make.  

If you are still not done with school like me, just know that I am right there with you and sending thoughts of poolside fun your way!!!