It's a Party; It's a Party!

Well it's the last week of school and it's time to celebrate how amazing my students have been the entire year! We have a full week of parties and rewards...so I'm going to break it down into two updates!

Monday was a "normal" day for my sixth grade kiddos. We had a regular schedule and decided to write letters to the upcoming sixth graders on Tips that they needed to know. Students chose to tell the sixth graders about things like not stressing over lockers, not worrying about getting lost within the school, and making sure to reach Accelerated Reader (A.R.) goals. Students then designed a "seal" for the Dolphin team to include with their letter. Get the letter and seal templates here! Check out some letters from my students:

 

 

Monday afternoon was also the 6th grade Student-Faculty Volleyball game. Sixth grade teachers volunteered to play against student volunteers in a three game match for winner! Needless to say the teachers had to make a team uniform. We decide to go black bottoms and neon colored tops. Don't we look awesome?

It was a great game and I know all students, teachers, cheerleaders, and those involved really enjoyed it. Here are some pictures from the history- making games :)

Teacher team!

Student team!

Our lovely teacher cheerleaders :)

The crazy student cheerleaders!

Daniel & Mrs. Kinnett keeping score. 

Tuesday was our 6th grade picnic. Students went to Encore classes first thing in the morning from 8:30 to 9:55am. When they came back we held our 6th grade hallway Yearbook signing. This is where we close all doors to the classroom, with students in the hallway, and let them mingle and sign each others' yearbooks. It gives students a chance to see other friends that they may not see within the last few days of school.

After 30 minutes of stuffy, heated, crowded yearbook signing, we take the kiddos outside for a picnic afternoon. Students are free to enjoy the afternoon with sports equipment, electronics (no phones of course), towels, blankets, and anything else they use to spend their time. Students get to hang out with all other sixth graders and really enjoy the afternoon. We also have a D.J. come out to occupy us with music, while we have our lunch catered by a local company. This year's menu was hamburgers and hot dogs provided by Honey Baked Hams. They were fabulous. Check out our lovely afternoon:

View from the hill of the 6th grade picnic! 

Our D.J. for the afternoon!

Our wonderful lunch crew from Honey Baked Ham.

 

Today, Wednesday, was our Accelerated Reader reward day. Students had individual goals to reach by reading books and taking comprehension quizzes. Students use the Renaissance Learning (Check It Out!) to complete their A.R. quizzes. As a reward for reaching their goals during our nine week period, we had a party all day :)

Our Dance Party outside.

The lovely snacks and drinks set up by our fabulous PTO!

 

Enjoying the day :)

We even had a photo-booth! 

Today we also held a little "get-together" for the softball team. With our eighth graders leaving us for high school in two days we wanted to give them one more send off. We will miss everyone greatly over the summer, but especially the eighth graders next softball season. Here's our final moments :(

Courtney & Sydney being goofy.

Yum Yum!

                               

Some of my eighth graders!

I love this group of girls :)

What am I to do without these lovely ladies next year? Is it softball season yet? I'm ready for August 19th to roll around ;)

Until Friday's post...with Demerit Reward day and Awards day.. Have I mentioned I can not believe it's the last week of school? :(

I'm Not Ready!

I can not believe it is almost the end of the school year. This year, out of my four, has easily been the year that flew by the quickest. I do not know if it is because of the always entertaining group of students I have this year, the switch the Common Core, or just the overall work load that I have found myself in, but it feels like we were just starting school a few weeks ago.

I'm beyond proud of my students during their EOGs these last two days. Wednesday and Thursday they full out beasted it spending close to four hours doing everything they could. I'm sure their little hearts were exhausted after two consecutive days of three plus hours of testing. Not mention the sitting and working quietly afterwards in respect to those still testing! It was a longgg two days. To keep my kiddos quite after testing I really like to have them reflect on things that they learned, did, or participated in throughout their sixth grade year. Therefore, I have them complete little writing prompts during the last 10 days of school reflecting on things. Check out the SmartBoard notebook lesson here! The questions are anything from:

- What were the three most important things you learned this year and why?
- What was the nicest thing someone did for you this year and how did you thank them?
- What is your favorite spot in our classroom, or throughout the school, and why?
- What are six adjectives that you would use to describe this school year?

There responses are getting pretty interesting and amusing!

Have I mentioned that I can not believe it is the end of the year...I am so not ready for it! I'm not ready to let these little guys go. I'm not ready to see my sixth graders as seventh graders, or my eighth grade athletes move onto high school. Can't they just stay this age forever (I feel so old saying it like that).

We held our awards banquet last night here at school. I almost got teary eyed a good number of times talking about my softball girls, my basketball girls, and how they are moving on to high school. I will definitely miss them! Here are some of our pictures from our classy evening last night:

Kat and Taylor (our basketball girls) with Coach Spargo (My teammie!)

Basketball girls!

So proud of my little Mini-Me. She is an
awesome athlete. 

Audrey and I. Another basketball girl and
ATHLETE OF THE YEAR!
Whoop Whoop

My Courtney! 

Oh what am I going to do without my Courtney? Not quite sure how I'll make it through two (softball and basketball) seasons without this one next year. Definitely going to miss them all :(







Today was Beach Blast at school. I have to tell you our P.E. department is fabulous (I'm not even just saying that because my husband is one of them ;) ). They put on our Beach Blast every year after EOGs for our students. Students pay a donation of $10 to the P.E. Department in order to attend a three hour beach festival. There is everything from field games (egg toss, tug-of-war, corn hole, etc.), to dunking booths (which yours truly was in), to a fire truck water slide. Our town fire truck actually comes to the school and we have a HUGE slip-and-slide down the hill using the first hose as a water source. The kids eat it up! Here are some pictures from our lovely afternoon:

The firetruck working the Slip-&-Slide! 

The kids are having a BLAST!

The field events. 

A little corn hole action.

Our girls having fun!

Enjoying a little sugar.

 

Oh Boys!

Having a great time! 

Absolutely love my softball girls! Even if they dunk me :)

It was an absolute BLAST (hence BEACH BLAST!). We had a ball; although I do believe we can call it a carnival from now on. Not to mention we got a little wet with the dunk booth :)

Yours truly in dunk booth.

That would be my husband behind the dunk booth.
He's so sweet!

Ohhhh a dunk from a kiddo.
Probably one of the close to fifty of them!

Well as we relax for the weekend (minus Master's Class Saturday morning and a couple baby showers to attend) I will keep you updated with the fabulous final week of school next week! We have everything from A.R. Reward (Accelerated Reader), Demerit Reward, 6th Grade Picnic, and Awards Day!
It's going to be busy...Until then :)

Rappin' Up Social Studies

It was MSL (Measures of Student Learning) day last week for my sixth graders and we have covered A LOT in our curriculum this year...just about 5,000 years. No biggie right? I have to say I believe my students were ready and prepared. I know they did fantastic last week and I can honestly say that I am beyond proud of them for their work this year! (P.S. I can not believe how quickly this year flew by!)

Our wonderful Social Studies curriculum instructor, Adam Perrow, sent over through Google Drive some review packets to help us study this week and here are my consolidated note pages that my students used. (Check Them Out!) As a reward I did tell my students I would embed the songs about our lessons that we used throughout the year to help us remember important dates, events, people, and parts of our curriculum. So with out delay...Here they are :)

If you have, for some reason, not been introduced to Flocab from Channel One news, please check him out! He has some wonderful songs that my students just fall in love with. He makes learning, especially Social Studies, so helpful and relate-able to students. You will find your kids singing and humming the songs during tests to help them remember things...It's wonderful! 

Today we also had the wonderful opportunity to play literary terms review Jeopardy with our A.I.G. (Academically and Intelligently Gifted) Specialist, Robin Spargo (She is even my teammate's wife!). The students had a great time and showed off some mad skills in literary term recognition. I do not mean to brag...but my Gray Dolphins are the new county record holders! Whoop whoop. We actually broke two records! The original record was 33,000. We had a 35,600 and a 48,800. I must say myself, I am pretty impressed. Way to go guys! 

Our Winners with 48,800! Congratulations! 

Our 2nd Place...But still county record breakers! Finished with 35,600! 

Until later this week :)

Getting Ready for Summer!

OK, so my title may be a little pre-mature. However, it is actually the truth. As many of you know, I am currently working on my Middle Grades Master degree through Appalachian State University. This summer I am excited to say, and super happy to brag about, that I am getting the opportunity to participate in the Writing Project Summer Institute through UNCC! Whoop whoop! The program does not occur until the first three weeks of July (July 1-19), but we got an early jump on things this Saturday at our orientation.

Getting to UNCC by 8:30am Saturday (can I tell you I was absolutely nervous?), I was excited to see how things were going to go this summer. We had a lovely little breakfast with coffee and bagels while we got comfortable and familiarized ourselves with other members of the group. At 8:30 we began with a super cute name introduction that had all individuals say their name with a movement to help us remember each other. I, being the girls basketball coach here at Cramerton, decided to pretend like I was shooting a game-winning three and say my name. P.S. I am definitely stealing this idea at the beginning of the year in August for my kiddos. It helped us get out of our nervousness and into some personality traits of others.

After we all introduced ourselves we went over the basics, the routines, and the pieces of our Summer Institute. We all received a little special present from the Writing Project, our daybooks! Have I mentioned that I absolutely love notebooks? I will write down anything and everything, so this daybook was like the best thing ever! In this daybook we are to keep thoughts, ideas, writings, and activities that we will do throughout the institute. It's like everything for three weeks kept in one nice little journal; I'm obsessed! We used it throughout the entire day.

One thing that I thought was really interesting during the day was a demo that was presented to us. We looked at the differences in gender roles in media and current popular culture. We began the demonstration by writing down a few notes about what popular culture influences us currently in our lives. Then we caught a video from a father and his view point on teachings of gender through media. The guy was Colin Stokes and I was astonished by some of the valid points he made during his presentation. Check him out here! During the video we communicated our thoughts and feelings through sticky note discussions (another awesome idea I'm stealing for my sixth graders!); basically we wrote our thoughts down on sticky's and shared them with those around us and avoided talking during the video. After the video we were given some popular articles steaming from Colin's twitter feed and separated them into categories on their purpose and points. Check out our web:

Then we came together from our three groups and shared what we found. It was interesting hearing the differences in opinions and thoughts throughout our groups. I really think personal age, gender, and family dynamics altered people's thoughts.

My favorite, and I think most powerful part of our orientation on Saturday was our closing activity. It was called word explosion (have I mentioned I'm stealing things from Saturday to use in my classroom?). We read a poem together, then as the reader was reading the poem for a second time, we wrote in the margins what words spoke to us and what our interpretation of them were. Then the third time the reader read the poem, when she read our word, we would repeat it, and then say what we wrote down. It was very confusing to understand the directions, but once the poem was being read, it was so powerful and influential. I feel as though the entire group got a better understanding of the poem, each other, and emotions through this activity. I believe it was an awesome way to relate the poem to the individual reading it. I loved it :)

After Saturday, I have to say I am even more excited about July coming (not only because it is anniversary time for Zack and I ;) ), but because I didn't think I could be more excited for the Writing Project Summer Institute. I feel as though I learned and was exposed to so much within those six hours, that I can only image what thirteen days will do for me! P.S...here is the updated Sarah daybook :)