Summer G.O.L.D. Program

At the end of this year, I offered my students and their parents the opportunity to sign up for a FREE program via email over the summer. This program is one I've created to help keep them learning over the summer. I named it Summer G.O.L.D. (Getting Organized and Learning Daily). The goal of this program is to keep my students learning over the summer.

Since this is my first summer doing this, I'm going to share the items on my blog for others to use. New newsletters and activities will be posted every Tuesday for download. Spread the word!

You can get the first newsletter here: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7NHbGd4HpUbU282RUd5VlZHblU/edit?usp=sharing

Feel free to use it and modify it for your personal use!

End of the Year Craziness

Before I found out that I was moving grades, I planned on posting about the end of the year and the craziness that surrounds it. Needless to say, the news of moving was so large that it overtook everything else. However, I felt the end of the year would be a good place to start now.

The end of the year always brings lots of interesting things - last minute conferences, excited kids, field day, crazy schedules, and a little bit of packing. I found out this year that it can also bring a few other things. On the last day of school, I had three different parents email or call to thank me for helping their child over the course of the year. I had students coming back from their dismissal lines for a second hug and others crying about leaving. One or two even joked that they weren't going to leave. It truly was a different ending this year. I have loved my kiddos this year and I'm certainly going to miss them.

One of my favorite moments at the end of the year was Awards Day. I decided to give each child a unique award in my classroom after the official Awards Ceremony. I've wanted to do this in the past, but never found the time to create them. This year, I made sure I found the time. Before handing out the awards, I showed them the class video that I made - complete with songs and pictures to store the year's memories. (On the last day, they received a copy on DVD with their report card. They were thrilled!) We had a good time handing out the awards and students were guessing the recipients as I read out the award. Often times, they were right! It really made for a fun-filled day of memories.

You can find a copy of these animal awards to download yourself in my TPT store. I printed them out, filled them in, and then glued them to scrapbook paper to add a little more color to them. The kids loved them!

Changes, Changes Everywhere

I decided at the end of April that I wanted to start a teaching blog. I spent part of May working on the layout and deciding what I wanted to focus on. The problem is, I never quite was able to pick one simple focus. There's too much that goes on in a classroom - you can't quite box it in, even for a blog. So, the focus will be all things teaching - sort of a hodgepodge. In this decision to focus on whatever fits, I forgot to figure out the first post. I knew it would be on June 1st, but I didn't know what my topic would be. Then, suddenly, I found my topic!

 Afterschool yesterday (a half-day), I got an email from my principal requesting a meeting at 1:00pm. I spent a couple of hours wondering what the meeting might be about. I made a mental list of possibilities before heading to the meeting. The item of discussion was not one of the possibilities I had prepared myself for. I was told I will be moving from second grade (where I've spent the past 3 years) to first grade. While this is a surprising change, I'm looking for the positives and hoping for an awesome year. It's just another change in my constantly changing life.

So, I spent today packing my entire classroom up so that it can be moved to another classroom. I had awesome helpers, including my parents and close friends on the grade level. We got it done for the day even officially was over. Yes, we had our final workday on a Saturday this year. I am officially confused about what day of the week it is!

So, since I'll be moving from second grade to first grade, this blog will follow some of that transition. My summer posts will mostly be about second grade stuff, but I'm sure first grade will start slipping into there.

"If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living." - Gail Sheehy