Weekly Update

Happy Saturday friends! Just popping in to share a few snaps from my week on Insta! 

This week's science focus was on the life cycle of a chicken! We learned all about oviparous animals, what the inside of an egg looks like, a chicken's life cycle, and even had our very own chicks hatch! You can grab this flip book in my life cycle of a chicken TPT product. 

We've also been celebrating a different student everyday! We draw a name out of a bag (the names are written on the back of the little pieces of paper pictured above) every morning and that student gets to be our line leader, our Go Noodle picker, a pencil, and a sweet note written to them from their classmates! It's the perfect way to end the school year! You can grab the "Let's Celebrate!" tags and a template for students to write their notes on for free here.

Friday was our Friendship Day. We made friendship mix (pictured above) and signed yearbooks. We also completed an end of the year memory book. You can grab my Friendship Day packet on TPT.

Last, but not least, my kiddos wrote the sweetest Mother's Day books for their moms this week! You can grab the template for our A-Z book here. 

I want to wish all the sweet mommas out there a very Happy Mother's Day! Enjoy your special day!

It's the Final Countdown {with a freebie}!

Well my friends we have *almost* made it to the end of another fantastic school year! I know that many of you have already begun to countdown those last days of school and plan your end of the year activities. With final assessments to do, grades to input, and crowds to control (ha!), there is no tired like end of the year teacher tired. I hope this little post will give you that extra "oomph" you need for those last days/weeks! 

 I've done this activity when teaching arrays for a couple of years now, but I always seem to revamp it each time. Keeping with a summer theme, I use the idea of picnic blankets to help my kiddos visualize what an array is. Once we had that picture in our minds, I drew my "picnic blanket" on an anchor chart and wrote a repeated addition number sentence to match my drawing.

After I modeled my "picnic blanket", I had my kids create their own "Picnic Array". I die cut several red and white squares and let my kids choose the array they wanted to create. Keeping your kids engaged is super important throughout the entire year and creating engaging lessons, for sure, shouldn't be forgotten at the end of the year just because we find ourselves just trying to make it through till summer. Letting my students have a choice on how to show their understanding of a concept and giving them the opportunity to manipulate objects (including small bits of paper, ha!) keeps them engaged! Like I said, I've revamped this lesson a couple of times and you can find my original idea here. (In the original lesson, my kids used checkered napkins to create their array.)

You can find this free printable to use with your "Picnic Array" lesson here. (Fonts by: Hello Fonts and Cara Carroll, Graphics by: Bubbly Borders and More and Creative Clips) 

Reviewing is another important piece of any end of the year countdown. I'm always left wondering if my kids have retained all the information that I have tried to pack into their little minds over the past nine months. That's where my Ready as can be for Grade Three math review comes in handy! 

This packet has a quick assessment for each second grade Common Core math standard. I usually have my students complete a couple of pages a day leading up to the last week of school. We then go over the pages in their review packet to check for understanding. You could also use this as a summer review packet and send it home with your students, or this can be used to preview firsties for second grade or review second grade standards at the beginning of third grade. However you use it, I hope you find it helpful for your students! This product can be found in my little shop here. 

Let's face it... I love a good theme day anytime of the year, but theme days at the end of the year are a MUST for me! Sadly, I had to take an unexpected early maternity leave and I cannot be there with my kiddos to celebrate the end of the year, but I did blog about my theme days last year. You can find that post here. You can click on the following titles to find these packets in my shop.

Beach Day

Campout Day

Friendship Day

All of my end of the year activities will be on sale until the end of the day. Hang in there friends and savor every final moment with your sweet class! If all else fails, keep calm 'cause it's almost summer!

End of the Year Theme Days

Hopefully you're like me and have been soaking up every little bit of precious summer! This post is a little late, but I was thinking you could maybe tuck it away for next year. :) Also, feel free to pin any pictures so you can be sure to find them when you go to plan end of the year stuff next year.

At the end of the year, my team and I plan theme days for the last week of school. I love theme days because I find that my students stay engaged in "school stuff" even though summer is so close they can taste it. Speaking of taste... Why yes, we do use a little food to keep up the engagement! Food definitely helps!

Even though we all do the same theme on the same day, we don't all necessarily incorporate the same activities into each day. So here's a peek into what I specifically do in my classroom...

Lazy Day at the Beach... We spend our beach day lounging on towels and reading outside on the field. We also chow down {both teachers and students, ha!} on popsicles. Of course you know with kids they can't just read outside all day, so I created stations back in my classroom to keep them engaged for the rest of our day and still stick to our beach theme. The best part, in my opinion, is that I found beach sounds on YouTube and I played that through our speaker system. The thing with stations is that they can get quite loud, but my rule was we can't be louder than the music. Here is the link to that YouTube video if you want to use beach sounds to add to your beach day excitement. Here is a look at my stations...

Froot Loop Graphing

Beach Puzzles

Summer Bucket List

Sun Craft

Beach Ball Craft

Since each student works at their own pace, I made a packet with printables from my Lazy Day at the Beach unit for them to work on while they waited to move on to the next station.

You can find my Lazy Day at the Beach unit here.

Cool Campout Day... For this theme day, we laid on blankets and read by the glow of the "campfire". We also made s'mores and worked on activities from my Cool Campout Day unit. Again, I found camping sounds on YouTube and it was the perfect background noise for reading. Here is the link to that YouTube video.

You can find my Cool Campout Day unit here.

Friendship Day... Our kiddos spent a good chunk of time signing yearbooks on Friendship Day. We also made Friendship Mix, Friendship Bracelets, and Friendship Necklaces, and worked on activities from my Friendship Day packet.

If you would like my Friendship Day unit you can find that here. The recipe for Friendship Mix, along with the Friendship Bracelet and Friendship Necklace templates, are all in my unit. What I love about this product is that I have included activities that would be perfect for the beginning of the year too! Next year, I will be incorporating the friendship theme into the first week of school. I may even make friendship mix the last day of the first week back as a special treat!

The other two theme days we had were Game Day and Movie Day. On Game Day, students brought in board games, not electronics, from home and took turns playing each others' games. It was so much fun to watch my kiddos playing games that I played as a kid! Movie Day is pretty self explanatory. We save that for the very last day because our kiddos aren't allowed to bring anything with them to school, so we just relax, watch a cute movie, and munch on popcorn {Pre-popped is the way to go!}.

Here is an example of the letter we send out to parents regarding our end of the year theme days...

Feel free to use the wording to help craft your own letter!

I'm off to enjoy this nice summer night! Hopefully I can can stay on top of blogging this summer!!

Oh yeah, all my end of the year units are on sale just in case you want to stock up for next year!!

Volunteer Gifts

I had two amazing room moms this year and I wanted to do a little something to thank them for all of their help. I bought two cups that I found at Michaels, which are the perfect cups for summer lounging by the pool, and filled them with Lifesaver mints. I then created a little tag and attached the tag using curling ribbon {I think that's the official name for that stuff, right!?}.

Cute, simple, and sweet! If you'd like the tag for your volunteer gift, you can find that here.

Font by Cara Carroll

Graphics by Krista Wallden