School's Out for the Summer!!! What Now?

Well it never fails when the end of May/early June rolls around everyone wants to know what I'm doing with my summer.  They are pretty sure the answer is going to be absolutely nothing.  Last summer I did quite a bit of that because I spent two years working 60-80 hours a week and might as well have slept in my classroom. This year, things aren't quite as laidback.  In June, I will be teaching summer school, going back to grad school, and doing a professional development course online (the setup sounds an awful lot like a college course).  In July, I have a 5k with my family (my first) and two conferences to go to.  I also have a list of projects that I want to get done. Definitely a busy summer.

Last summer, I let the summer get away from me and didn't get half as much done as I wanted to.  We were also starting two new series and you never know how it is going to go until you get started so I felt like I was in limbo and didn't know what to do.  Not this summer.  I have a project list a mile long and I am determined to get as much done as I can.  So how do you stay motivated? How can I make sure my summer doesn't slip away and suddenly it's August and I'm back in my room with all my wishes still sitting on that list?

I started that this week.  I actually want to try during July to make sure I keep a regular schedule.  I live alone so there are no kids to keep me moving. It's easy for me to just laze around and say I'll do it later.  My goal is to work from 8-3 with a leisurely lunch break.  If something comes up, then I don't have to stick to it (I went to yoga class this morning), but just laying around on the couch isn't going to be an excuse.  This is taking some will power because right after lunch I really want to call it quits and take a nap. Remind me again why nap/mandatory rest time isn't required throughout school...

I am the queen of work while I'm watching tv or lying in bed.  While I usually opt for that on weeknights during the year because I still get to pretend I'm relaxing (pretend being the operative word there), during the summer I have cleared off my desk and made an actual work space that I'm going to use.  It makes it less likely for me to "accidentally" shut the computer and watch another episode of Gilmore Girls.

I'm bad about going and going and going until I'm burnt out.  I want to make sure the time that I do take off I really enjoy.  For example, I spent Memorial Day weekend with my family.  I thought about bringing a laptop.  I thought about all the things I could start working on from their house. I opted not to.  I decided that was my time and I was allowed to enjoy it.  GASP!!! Time where teachers don't work.  Time where we don't think about our class.  What is that? I already know there are certain times that I won't stick to my work schedule because I have other things that are MORE IMPORTANT than my classroom.  It's ok to have fun. It's the summer and I don't want to spend next year burnt out and tired because I didn't take care of myself this summer.

Do you have ways that you stay motivated to accomplish some of that to-do list during the summer?

Pack It Up

Every year I try to find more ways to pack things so I can quickly and easily unpack. Also, I have exactly one shelf across my back wall that I can stack things in and on. Everything else has to be put away and empty. 

This year my new trick is my manipulative buckets. Each student has a set of manipulatives that is all their own. I had a student teacher working in my room so we were able to check that every bucket had the right supplies and replace what was needed. She also went through and numbered everything (you should definitely do that before you put them out but I live and learn the hard way).

That was right before testing. This is the first week after testing and today the student's morning work was to take everything in their manipulative bucket and bag it up. The only things that wouldn't fit were their rulers and place value charts so I had them leave those out. 

I took those gallon ziploc bags and put them in a large box. Now my manipulative buckets are ready for next year with minimal effort!!

End of the Year Scrapbooks

This post may seem a little premature, but it's never too late to prep for the end of the year right? Ok so the year hasn't started yet, but this takes all year to put together.

I love for my students and their families to see how far they have come since the beginning of the year.  If you go back and look at pictures from the beginning of the year and compare them to the end of the year, they are SO different! Add in how much their skills improve, like writing, and you will be amazed.  As much as I say it is for my students and families to see a difference though, it is just as much for me.  As teachers we tend to get overwhelmed and all we see are the things that we didn't get to this year.  It's nice to have something to show us that even if we didn't teach every single lesson we wanted to, we made a ton of progress.  The best way I've seen to do that is to do a scrapbook for the end of the year.

When I found out our hallway all does scrapbooks for our kids I thought there was no way that I was ever going to get enough to put in a scrapbook...boy was I wrong.  About half of the scrapbook was pictures and the rest was writing.

We took pictures for:

• First Day of School
• Field Trips
• Hall Decorations
• Christmas
• New Years
• Valentines
• Superhero stories (we used Face in Hole to make them superheroes)
• Mother's Day
• Recess Pictures
• Quizbowl Pictures
• Parties
• Centers
• Grandparents Night
• Open House
• Pretty much anything else we could think to take pictures for
• Class pictures

Any time my students wrote a published paper that I would hang in the hall, I kept the work and put it in a file for my students. Some things we wrote about were:

• Beginning of School what we are like
• Grandparent's Day Why I Love My Grandparents
• Field Trips
• What we are Thankful for
• Disguising a Turkey
• Letter to Santa
• Letters to Soldiers for Christmas
• Superhero Narrative
• Descriptive Writing about Monsters
• The students created a publisher page about their Halloween that used clipart and borders.
• Letter to a Valentine
• New Year's Resolutions
• How to Catch a Leprechaun
• Narrative about a time they were happy or their favorite day
• Letter to the principal explaining what the student would do if they were the principal

Those are just the things I can remember.  Anything that you do can end up in the scrapbook.  It does take time and planning though.  I spent a large portion of the end of my year working on these scrapbooks because I hadn't kept up with them.  

What I Wish I Did Last Year:

We took pictures about once a month for this, that, and the other.  Those pictures of each student ended up on my computer on an edited page with cute graphics and captions.  I was pretty good at making the pages for all my students when I took the pictures.  Unfortunately I didn't print them off until the end of the year so it took forever.  Plus I still had to make some of the pages.  This coming year when I make them I plan on printing them so it is one less end of the year hassle.  Here are some examples of picture pages with me front and center:

Their writing pages were either typed on a computer with a border or they were hand-written on cardstock with fun borders.  Once again, I didn't always print out the typed pages, so this coming year I want to print them as they complete them so it is one less thing I have to do to complete the scrapbook at the end of the year.  The other problem I had was that some of my pages were laminated and some weren't because once again I didn't make time to get it done during the school year.  It was one of those things that I kept thinking "When I have a chance..."  I ended up not going back and laminating because there were just too many to do.  Plus anything that was printed at the end of the year didn't get laminated either.  It was ok for the scrapbook, but it doesn't mean they will hold up well over the years and my goal was to make something parents could keep.

With all those pages, putting the book together was actually pretty easy.  I made a list of all the things that went in the book and made sure the list was ordered.  The students' work was already separated into an individual folder so when they brought me the binder I requested I could just hole punch and put in the pages.  It actually isn't as much work as it sounds like if you do the printing, laminating, and separating work throughout the year.  I think of it as 20 minutes or so every couple weeks or month or hours of work at the end of the year.  I have to say they turned out adorable and I hope my parents were as excited to get them as I was to see them finished!

School's Out for the Summer...What do Teachers do in the Summer?

At the end of May my room was boxed up, my kids were headed home, and we were all talking about how great summer was going to be.  Well, it's the end of June and school is finally out for me.  Yes, I was one of the crazy people that signed up to do summer school for a month.

I can't complain because I actually enjoy it.  For a whole month I don't have a set agenda of what HAS to be accomplished.  Instead, I get to see where some of my future students are at, what skills we need lots of work on, and what I honestly don't teach well. I use summer school to be a better teacher.

I spent the first couple weeks of summer school really focusing on grammar.  Grammar is one of those things that many people I know struggle to teach and I don't always do the best job at it.  So I taught the first few grammar skills that we would be learning next year.  I found some great resources, created some powerpoints, and came up with a list of ideas for future resources I want to create.  If I hadn't taught summer school I wouldn't have been able to try some of these out on my kids to find out what was working for me and what wasn't.  Once I've refined those resources a little more I will start sharing. :)

So now that summer is over, what in the world will I do?  Anyone else have a summer "want to" list?  Mine is pretty long.  I will be spending some togetherness time with my family this summer and later this summer I will be helping my mom set up her classroom since she is changing grade levels.  The last two years she has gone above and beyond in helping me with my classroom so I'm hoping I can be half as helpful.

I do plan on doing lots and lots of reading this summer.  I love reading, but somehow it just doesn't get done as much during the school year.  On my summer list are:

1. My Dad's book (No that isn't the name of a book.  My Dad wrote a book he hasn't published yet and I am in the middle of reading it.)
2. Lies My History Teacher Told Me
3. Yoga School Dropout
4. The Bhagavad Gita
5. Fault in Our Stars (I know I'm a little late to the show on this one. Don't ask how long it took for me to get around to the Divergent series.)
6. The other five billion and one books that are on my list that I haven't read yet.

The other big item on my summer "want to" list is to add to my TPT store.  I got started during the snow days and then didn't keep creating.  I get super excited when they send an e-mail saying I've sold something.  Now I just have to get a more somethings up to sell.  I have a list of a million resources I want to create, so it is just a matter of sitting down and creating them.  Along with creating resources I also need to create some centers.  I have lots of prepackaged games on my shelves that our district has purchased, but I usually want something a little more specific for my kids.  My goal is either to find some games or centers that target exactly what I want or to create some.  Of course that means ultimately there will be lots of laminating and cutting and folders and ziploc bags and time spent on the couch organizing and putting together.  At least I have Netflix right??

What are your summer plans?

End of the Year Brochures

Well it's the wonderful end of the year.  We've been through testing fun days, write-up free days, awards assemblies, packing, cleaning, sending things home, inventories, grades, filing, and all the other wonderful little tidbits that you have to do.  One thing I wanted to do this year was to add a fun project at the end of the year so my third graders could look back on the year and make it something my new class could benefit from.  As I looked around for ideas I saw students doing letters and similar things, but I loved the idea of doing a brochure (can't remember where I saw the idea).

My kids adore using the laptops to publish their writing so I decided the end of the year would be a great time to take that a step farther.  I created a brochure template and decided on four topics: What you love about third grade, how you felt when you came to third grade, fun things you do in third grade, and what you learned in third grade.  I went ahead and put the topics as headings on the brochure template and created textboxes for them to type in.  With this project my goals were for students to type their paragraphs, change fonts, navigate pages, edit text box borders and insert clip art.  We didn't work on the computers as much as I wanted this year, so those tasks in themselves would take a lot of time and effort.

We started by writing a paragraph for each topic.  This crew of kids aren't fans of writing so this is like pulling teeth, but this was something they could identify with, wasn't difficult, and they actually half-way enjoyed it.  When they found out they were getting to publish on the computer and do fonts and borders they were ecstatic.  Their next question was if they got to share them with the class.  They may not like writing but they definitely like talking. The kids loved this project and I can't wait to show them to next year's students.

It is easy to use one of the pre-made templates on Word or Publisher if you are doing editing on the computer.  If you want to be a little more low-tech with this assignment, you can get a free printable here.