End of the Year Scrapbook

I had this fabulous idea at the beginning of the year that I would show everything I had done for our scrapbooks as the year progressed. I think I even got through Christmas with at least some ideas. For me, that's not bad. I didn't really keep it up though. I will give a look inside though.

January: My student's did a New Year's Resolution page. Next year I want to do a photo booth so I have a picture. January is also when we wrote our superhero narrative. The kids also got to pick a superhero on FaceinHole and we made superhero pictures to go with their story. 

February: My kids are "Wanted" for some lovely crimes. They get to come up with their Valentine themed crime. We also write a Valentine letter to include in the scrapbook. 

March: This year my student's drew a leprechaun trap and wrote a story about trapping a leprechaun. We also studied adjectives and they wrote ten adjectives describing themselves around their picture. To top it off we did a unit on animals and researched an animal and created a PowerPoint. The PowerPoint slides were included in the scrapbook.

April: April is one of my favorites just because we have a little fun. First, we took pictures with photo booth props and turned ourselves into rabbits. Then they wrote a story about their teacher's secret life. We also wrote letters to the principal to tell them what we would do if we had our job. 

  

End of the year: I try to have the scrapbooks done by testing because after testing things tend to move fast. This helps me get them put together. I try to include a poem from me and a few added pages like pictures from recess or from fun things we did in class.

Throughout the year I try to laminate and keep them in order and I have files for each student. Once I have most of the pages I hole punch them. Right after Spring Break I send home a note asking for a binder with a cover that I can insert a cover page in. It doesn't take long at all to put them together if you've done the work ahead of time. 

Christmas Scrapbook Pages

For the Christmas season I do a ton of scrapbook pages.  This year we wrote letters to Santa, letters to soldiers, and then I did a Christmas picture of the kids.  Each of those was a separate page.  For the letters to Santa and to the soldiers I used the same page.  Letters to Santa had the student's picture in the corner next to the signature.  Letters to the soldier had clip art instead.  You can premake the pages and print them out so they can be handwritten or you can have students type out their final drafts.   The result of the letter pages looked something like this:

The Christmas picture page was already shown in another post but here it is again.

The clip art is from Shalece Elynne, Surfin' Through Second, and Teaching My 3.  I also used PicMonkey to add reindeer noses and antlers, elf hants and ears, santa hats or any other cute things onto the kids' pictures. 

Halloween Scrapbook Pages

It seems like this time of year I add quite a bit to my kids' scrapbooks. During October we go to the pumpkin patch on a field trip and we have a ton of fun and take lots of pictures and I make a field trip scrapbook page.

To add to that we also do monster writing. I love working on descriptive writing because my kids really need help making their stories more interesting.  Monsters make it easy because they get to use their imagination. The first thing we do is draw monsters. My kids are much more into art this year so their drawings were spectacular and every kid had their own brand of creativity. Once we drew our monsters, we practiced brainstorming and we spent a ton of time talking about adjectives. Then they wrote paragraphs describing their monsters.  We got these up in time for conferences so our parents could see them.  The kids loved showing them off.

We also include our first publisher project in our scrapbook.  Most of my kids are great with technology, but in third grade they haven't really worked with any word or computer programs designed specifically for publishing.  In October my kids get a crash course in text boxes, fill color, lines, clip art, fonts, and typing skills. We do all of this in Microsoft Publisher and the kids get so excited.  It takes a lot of convincing to get them to focus on the writing and not all the extras.  Ok so that doesn't really happen in real life because who doesn't love clip art, but a teacher has to try.

Pumpkin Patch Scrapbook Page

One of our field trips is a trip to a local pumpkin patch.  Our kids get to have a ton of fun and they get to bring home a mini pumpkin for Halloween.  I make two scrapbook pages out of the trip.  The first page is our class photo.  Field trips are great opportunities to get class photos because almost all your kids will show up for these.  Haha.  This scrapbook page was super simple.  The background was by Graphics from the Pond (AMAZING clipart) and I found a cute pumpkin font here.  This was the end result except instead of the ugly black box you would obviously put your class picture.

The second page was more personal. The day after we went to the pumpkin patch I had my students write a paragraph about their experience on the field trip. They published this on the computer and I printed it out on cardstock.  One field trip, two scrapbook pages!

Beginning of the Year Scrapbook Page

Earlier I talked about the End of the Year Scrapbook that we create for our kids.  I thought it would be a good idea to show specific pages that I used in case you are interested in creating one too.  On the first day of school I like to give my students a chance to express themselves in an easy, non-stressful way.  This is a great little page by Doris Young that gives them something easy to do to ease us back into routine.

While they work on writing and coloring, I pull kids to take photos of their first day of school.  I make sure I have some kind of sign showing it is the first day of third grade.  This year I found these adorable signs on TPT by Teach and Tell Us that the students color themselves. I'm going to see how they turn out, but I'll probably have another sign ready for my kids to use just in case.

All you have to do is put each student's picture on a background and you have your first scrapbook page. I also include the "I'm Glad to be in grade 3" page in the scrapbook because my kids had some super cute excitements and nerves.

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!