That's a Wrap! School year prep!

Are you ever wondering what to do with those last few minutes of your school day when you are waiting for the buses to be called?  I have to say that it is the most challenging part of the day for me. There is no time to do something and to be honest sometimes your lessons just wrap up earlier than expected.   So instead of all the craziness  or down time as I like to call it I figured we would wrap up our day differently this year.  Here is my plan.  Once everyone is packed up we will and prepped to go home we will gather on the carpet and share a favorite moment that happened during our school day.  Was it a great lesson, a great assembly we had, a special visitor, or anything the kids want to remember from our day.   Near my carpet area I plan on having this on a board we can pull out if you don't have the space or simply place it on a wall near our carpet area.  I have 3 themes in this set to choose from a bee, beach ball, and owls. 

First I will pick a theme and for this purpose I chose the owls .  Each day the kids will be asked to help me fill in the blank on our wall.  It says " Our day was a hoot when..." 

Tip:  To save paper and time you can run these on cardstock and use a dry erase marker to record events week to week.  I plan on doing that as well!  :) 

This will take just a few minutes each day to record what our favorite part of the day. 

Now Friday will be a different kind of day.  Before the end of the day I plan on using our writing time to revisit the board and talk about what our Hoot of the week was for Monday -Thursday.  The students will be given slips of paper or another time saver laminate the large voting paper to record the votes for the best Hoot of the week. 

We will tally the amount of votes and decide the Hoot of the Week and head back to our desks to use our handy graphic organizer included to write about our favorite Hoot of the week.  When writing is completed students will file it away in their labeled writing folders that I will have designated for this activity.  (Immediate writing sample collected already in case you forget to collect one for the month!  ) 

Tip:  I plan on copying a class set of these ahead of time (this summer) to save time . 

At the end of the month each student will choose one of their writings from the month and decide which one will go into their end of the year booklet that we are creating...that's right at the beginning of the year...because the end of the year is always busy.  So by the end of the year the students will put their books together and have terrific memories of our school year.  And the best part is I can choose some of their writings for a class book to share with my class next year.  And if I need a writing sample right away guess what I have three other samples  month by month if I need them. 

I hope you find it useful in your room too! 

Julie