Last day of School

Tomorrow is the last day of school for students. It's been a very amazing year full of learning for myself and for the students. They never cease to amaze me. I know that tomorrow is going to be difficult for me; the last day of school always is. I think that teaching grade 5 makes it a little bit harder because my students are off to middle school next year. At least the middle school is close so hopefully they will come and visit.

Today we cleaned the classroom some more. We emptied out our desks and piled them in one corner of the room. Most of their work went home with them but there are still a few assignments and things that need to be passed back. I just hope we manage to get it all done tomorrow.

Tomorrow we will be looking at some of the things we did over the year, talking about our favourite memories, and talking about the future. I had the students write their favourite memory of another student in the class today. Some came up with some very thoughtful memories. It's wonderful to see how these students have grown and matured this year.

Our room looks like a tornado hit it right now. It looks like I'll be the only grade 5 teacher next year, which has good points and challenges to it. One challenge that I did not foresee was that all of the English materials had to be moved into my room from the other Grade 5 room. There are now random piles of English books and things throughout the room. I will be very busy over the summer sorting through it all.

I'm working on burning off DVD's of videos that the students made and that I made for them to go in their report cards. After that I'm going to pick out a few books from my library to include in tomorrow's mega-draw. We do weekly draws in our classroom for positive participation, but I do a bigger draw where everyone gets a prize with some bigger prizes like books at the end of the year.

I was just looking back over the posts on this blog. After we got our school website I stopped posting as much about what we were doing and kept more to posting our daily messages. I think that next year I will use the school website for daily messages, student work and videos and keep this one mainly for writing about the class for myself and for those interested in reading. It will be more of a teacher blog than a classroom blog since our school website has a page for our class that can serve the same purpose.

All good things must end. This has been a good year. Au revoir mes amis!