Beginning and End of the Year Activities

How is it July already?! That seems unfair somehow. Summer goes by so fast...

As the beginning of the year slowly creeps its way to reality, I started revamping my beginning and end of the year activities. I use activities at both ends of the year that compliment each other. When the end of the year arrives, I like to revisit our beginning of the year thoughts when we first arrived in 4th grade... and use those memories and feelings to help out the kids that will be entering my room in the new year. I am putting together this bundle which should be complete by August. 

The Beginning of the Year

 I like to make the first couple of weeks all about building a community. The success of my class is 99.5% depending on the relationships we all build so in addition to creating class rules, I want my students to know that I am here as one of their teammates to encourage them to grow and succeed. One of the first activities I have my class complete is a letter to me.

I ask kids about their favorite things, what made last school year good for them, some things a teacher should always do, and how I can help them succeed. This is also the first time they will think about goals for the year.

After completing this, I give them letter's that last year's kids wrote. The format is very similar and covers a lot of the same information but with an emphasis on what last year's students would like this year's student's to know.

We circle back to this at the end of the year and I have the kids review all of the things the wrote. We talk about how they felt that first day, what they wished they had known, how they felt that first day, and then spend some time reminiscing on what a great year we had!

To get our math brains warmed up, we do this All About Me in Numbers activity. This activity also serves as a great quick assessment and gives me information on how my students think as mathematicians and as a gauge to see how confident they are with math. Some years, I leave the space open for them to create their own question. Other years, I give them this worksheet with prompts. They answer the prompts with an equation- the answer to the equation is the answer to the prompt. For example - "My age" could be 32-22. The equation difficulty level varies greatly from kid to kid and again tells me A LOT about their comfort with math, but also helps me get to know them more.

During these first weeks, I also do a lot of Growth Mindset work and team building- I will circle back to that in another post.

End of the Year

This year I had one of those classes that you just rarely get. First, I ended up with only 19 students (in 4th grade! Unheard of) so I am sure that helped... I always feel like my class is a family by the end of the year but there was something about this class and this year that was different. The end of the year... sucked. None of us wanted it to be over. I have had classes that I loved, that I was sad to see go... but I was always ready for summer lol Always. Not this year though... I am still sad the year had to end. So the last week we just had one prolonged group hug. Ha! Kidding. But we did have a lot of fun.

I had the kids jump on a shared google doc. They went person by person and wrote one positive adjective that described them
(I know- risky- but it isn't hard to see who is writing what and again, this is the best class I have ever had in my entire career so I felt good about this.) I then turned this list into a fun WORDLE, printed them out and gave them the word art with this poem on the back.

I will post more about the end of the year is a separate post, but for now... the weather has finally cleared up, the sun is shining once again and I am going to head out to enjoy the last days of summer!

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