End of the Year Gifts

It was so sad to say goodbye to my students on the last day of school last Thursday! I loved this group. I was fortunate enough to have many of these students not once, but twice. They were in my very first Young 5's class 3 years ago.

I put together a special gift for them at the end of the year. I wish I would have gotten a picture of it, but I forgot with the last day madness! Hopefully you can envision it...

I started with a sand pail from The Dollar Tree. I filled it with 3 laminated, bound books: one of our Snazzy Snack recipes from the year, one for them to do summer journaling in, and one was a Memory Book in which they wrote about their memories from 2nd grade. Next, they got a pencil that read "Have a Super Summer!" (to use with their journal, of course). :) After that they found a beach ball that read, "Hope you have a ball this summer".

Then came the gift I was most excited about: a DVD that I made for them. I used iMovie on my Mac to compile pictures and video clips I had taken throughout the year. I set them to music and created a 14 minute long DVD displaying our memories from September to June. We watched it on the last day, and I don't think there was a dry eye in the classroom at one point! We were all getting pretty emotional as the end of the day drew closer. You can see the movie by visiting my Vimeo page at the link below.

http://vimeo.com/user5321202

The last thing that I put in their sand pail was an idea from my amazing mom! She is a professional baker/cake decorator, and she came up with the idea. The book worm cookies were ADORABLE!!! Use the link below to learn about it. :)

http://www.mrswallbank.com/Site/Star_Readers.html

I had a student on the last day of school bring their postcard BACK about an hour after he left for the day. (I was still there packing up my classroom...ugh.) He was so excited to get the postcard back to me that he ran right home and read 3 books so he could return it. Pretty sweet, huh? :)