Last day of school

It's been a bittersweet and crazy week.

Monday: Graduation practice and Field Day

They had to play this really ridiculous relay where a pop can was suspended between two players holding a piece of thin spaghetti in their mouths. My team was so not into it, until the whistle blew and then they were suddenly overcome with competitiveness. (Tear, my kids rock.) We totally killed this one. And I'm just going to forget the softball tourney when they were literally laying in the outfield screaming about their boredom.

I also had them do this year's fingerprint tree. I love this tradition.

Tuesday: Knotts' Berry Farm Ditch Day

I don't do roller coasters. So I joined up with a couple of other teachers and we swapped kids. They took Team Roller Coaster through all the long lines and terrifying rides, and I took Team Wuss on the carousel.

We did more than the carousel. All of Team Wuss went on Jaguar, the "easy" coaster, which was actually a bit scarier than I remembered it and had described it to my kids, but they all (minus one) loved it. Team Wuss preferred to stay on the side of the park with the smaller rides, so after eating some turkey legs and watching our friends get whiplash on the Accelerator, I parked it on a bench for awhile with all our stuff (including two new balloon pets) while they repeatedly went on the Dragon Swing (actual name unknown).

Wednesday: Take room apart, read kids' messages on the board, and graduation!

I did not write that on the board.

I was going to put up a couple pictures from graduation, but there are too many kid faces in them. Trust me, they were all adorable.

Thursday: Technically the last day of school for all other grades. I started my summer project of going through all my printed files, chucking nonessentials, and reprinting unit items that had been lost. Got all the way through unit 1 before heading out to the end of the year staff luncheon. Normally that would be the end of the year, summer officially started except...

Friday: CPR Training

Yes, today we had to get up one more time for normal school hours to attend CPR training. None of us counted it summer until the guy (finally!) said, "All right, that's the end of our workshop...." He probably said more after that but I was too busy internally cheering and externally gathering my stuff.

SUMMER!!!

Found in a textbook...

Math Libs

Details to come… This is the final product from a big review activity we’ve been doing the last couple of days.

UPDATE: So here's how this activity works. You need LOTS of word problems. This review was on Systems of Equations, and I tried to find problems that students would need to write equations for in slope-intercept form and in standard form. There are 8 stations for the Who, Where, When, etc; each station holds a paper with four word problems and students choose one to solve. 

On the back of the paper, they find the answer they came up with and fill in the Mad Lib category with that response. 

They end up with some awesome stories, and usually by the end of class I'm bombarded with requests to run and show Mrs. Pro (vice principal) or Mr. Stinson (sixth grade teacher whom they all LOVE), who somehow end up being the main character in most of these things.