Wrapping Up the End of the Year!

Well! It has been a whirlwind of wrapping up, packing up and finishing up around here! We are finally out for the summer, and while I will miss my kiddos, I am very glad for the time off! We had our last day on Thursday, and I had to have my whole classroom packed up and cleaned so that our local YMCA could move in by 3pm Friday! Talk about stressful! Everything had to come off the walls, furniture had to be emptied, cleaned and pushed against one wall, and cupboards had to be emptied unless I wanted things to walk off. I tell you, by 2pm on Friday afternoon, with only an hour to go, I was saying to heck with some of the stuff - if it walks off this summer or gets broken, I guess I'll just have to replace it!

I have to share some images from our final week. We had our BragTag ceremony where the students got to add beads to their necklaces and string the tags they'd earned:

Passing out the tags, picking out beads and trying to string them so they faced the same direction took quite a bit of concentration! We all gathered around the carpet for a good 30 minutes, reminiscing about what each tag represented.
For those of you new to BragTags, they are from www.imagestuff.com. You can custom order them and they are about 36 cents a piece. The company is fabulous to work with - you choose colors, design, shape etc and they make free proofs for you to view with no obligation to buy! They also have teacher packs that have all sorts of tags for attendance, homework, citizenship etc. The tags are plastic coated so they are very durable - I have students from last year who still have their necklaces! Here are some finished necklaces:

 

We got tags for being good spellers, for going on a field trip, for finishing our Chicken Life Cycle unit, for doing different Homework projects etc.


We used Marsha of A Differentiated Kindergarten's Ball Words Series to help learn our sight words this year, so this tag was for learning all 220 Dolch sight words!

I'm happy to say that 21 of 26 kiddos earned this one!

We had a Math Club that students could earn entry to - it was for any grade level, and they got a t-shirt and their name on a bulletin board. For 1st grade the standard was 100 addition problems with sums to 20 in 5 minutes. For kindergarten it was writing numbers from 1-100 and completing 10 addition problems with sums to 5 in 5 minutes. Once they earned their entry to the Math Club they got this tag:

I had to get them a special tag for it, because the shirt looked like this:

Did you notice anything about the t-shirt? Apparently the printer didn't either, which is why we got the shirts for free. I still think we should have trashed them and paid for properly printed shirts, but $ won out over common sense unfortunately, so I hoped that the BragTag would help make up for it. Surprisingly, we got not a single parental complaint about the shirts....

I have a few more end of year photos and stories to share, but I'll save them for another post. Now that I'm out of school I think I'll have more energy to blog :) so hopefully I'll be able to post several times a week over the summer. I have so much to share!

Oh, and thanks for all the sweet comments about our ultrasound appointment! We did indeed find out the gender - it was kind of hard to miss in fact, it was pretty much the only body part that baby decided to show off - for everything else he made sure to turn away from the camera! Yep, it is another boy - I'd show you the pic, but its rather pornographic since he truly was flaunting! Instead I'll show you the one semi-decent look we got at his chubby little face:

Now we just have to work on a name. I have one I've been using for him, but no one else in the family likes it. Of course since no one else can come up with anything better, I might be able to have my way with this. Seems we used up all the "good" names with our first 3 boys - Robert Andrew Frederick (he got the grandfathers' names), Thomas Patrick Ryan, and Joshua James Kees. Since we call them Robbie, Tommy and Joshie we wanted another name that could be shortened with a long e sound like that. My children are also insisting it has an O in it since they have a "secret" club called "MoRoToJo" (daughter's name is Moira) and if baby wants in apparently he will have to have a name that fits the consonant-O pattern lol.

So obviously, finding a name is going to be a tall order - almost as hard as keeping him in till his August 16th due date! I'm already having contractions - you know those "practice" contractions that I assure you I do not need after birthing 4 children! My body has had enough practice thank you very much! Not to mention the joys of gestational diabetes - one minute my blood sugar is too high and my vision is blurry and I'm soo sleepy, the next minute it nose dives and I get all sweaty and shaky. Again, very thankful school is over so I can deal with all of this without dealing with 26 kiddos at the same time!