School's Out for Summer! Part 1: Last Days of Learning

Hi guys! This series has been a long time coming! I am so excited to finally begin! I don't know about you, but my school year is rapidly winding down. It is coming quickly to a close and there is still so much to do. I wanted to share my process for closing out the year with you as well as some ideas for the last day!

First up,

It's May/June. The kids are done. You're done. The school year is almost done. You are just trying to get everybody to dismissal and stay sane! Not to mention all the other stuff you have to do that comes from admin like data. So what do you do to maintain control while you finish up the paperwork?

I have spent oodles of time throughout the beginning of the year to get the kiddos trained in navigating the classroom centers independently. So by now they have it down pat and could probably do it in their sleep. So I put out reading and math centers from all year that the students can choose to do.

Some of their favorites have been time and money centers! They love to play with the money and "buy" things from each other and the plastic clocks to quiz friends on time.

These summer/June themed Time and Money math centers are available in my store HERE.

I also pull out all those worksheets and activity pages that I copied but never got to throughout the year.

All the copies! Sometimes I over copy but it's always good to have more than enough than not enough, right?

I'll set this out in stacks and the kids can pick which ones they want to do. I've got grammar sheets, mystery pictures, word searches, cut and paste activities, etc. I notice some of my students playing "teacher" with their friends while they pass out and complete the worksheets.

While all this is going on, I'm finishing up with the DRA, end of year testing, diagnostic testing, filing IEPs, SBLCs, etc. There is so much to do it seems! But it must be done and somehow finished before the last day of school!

It's also time to get together end of the year gifts for your students. I've seen lots of fancy end of year gifts for students on Pinterest and they are TOTES ADORBS but I prefer to keep it simple. Especially at the end of the school year because it is inanely busy. So I made these cute little tags and found some sunglasses at the Dollar Tree. I cut them out with crafting scissors (because like I can even attempt to cut a round circle out on the lines at this time of the year!)

The crafting scissors make it look like I cut it that way on purpose.

And I did.

Really.

Click the pic to download the tags for yourself!

I also made this simple to put together flipbook for the summer!

It's mostly editable. There are ideas for family fun, summer websites to keep learning fresh, road trip and summer bingo, and summer brag tags!

Find it for FREE in my TpT store {HERE}!

We try to keep the kids working until the last possible moment! The last three days for us are always early dismissal days so we have the students all morning. We do some fun stuff! Here's what's up for the next few days:

- Paper Airplane Race (teach kids how to make airplanes, or use Google to research!)

- Lego Tower (nothing motivates like trying to out-build each other's towers!)

- Quiz Bowl (make up review questions for the year, or just some fun facts!)

- Design Contest (give students a topic and have them make a design)

- Mystery Pictures (I LOVE First Grade Wow's extensive collection)

- Summer Bucket List (List things they want to do this summer)

- Letter writing to future first graders (Be experts and tell the incoming class what they need to know!)

- Letter to future teacher (tell your new teacher what they should know about you!)

I've also got some low prep summer activity sheets that I pass out for students to complete while we movie watch, because we WILL watch movies!! It's inevitable! How can we make it through the year without watching the Lego Movie? I mean, really!!

You can do all of these activities quickly and easily with little to no prep on your part. Just grab some paper, crayons, and your little friends and you're good to go.

But just in case you want it already done for you, I've created an end of the year little prep time packet. Here are some pics of what's included: