So my school year has come to a close for me here in my rural, little town! It ended with watching the class movie we had filmed, handing out year books to sign, and final report cards. There was a touch of sadness mixed with great excitement as the students exited my door for the final time- you see, I am moving to a new school over the summer!
My wife and I am ready to embrace this moving thing head-on! We are working like crazy to sell our home in our current community so that we might start searching for our new home! Anyways...
After the students left, I set to work boxing up my room. Well... let me rephrase that, my wife, kids, and even my administrator, start boxing books. The boxes you see in the front of the picture below are about 1/5 of my books. My entire student library is approximately 50 boxes of books (or more). With my classroom nearly packed, I am excited to start the moving process and start setting up my new room. WAHOO!
On this same note, of packing up my 13 years of teaching, I wanted to create an activity that would allow my students this same opportunity to pack up their school year and leave with good thoughts about all that we had accomplished this year. So, I took my Outside the Box Projects idea and turned it in to something that I just love!
Students start by filling out six mini-assignments about themselves, the year favorite memory, etc.
There is one side where they remove a small rectangle to make an opening.
Once all the circles are complete the students cut them all out.
The circles are then assembles into a cube.
The finished cube is then set slit side up on the students desks.
Students are then given compliment strips (enough for each student in the class, including themselves) to fill out. I made them more fill in the blank so that it would go a bit faster.
I filled out one for each students as well. When the students finished filling them out, they cut them apart, and then delivered them to each student by dropping them into their cube.
This activity was a HUGE success and I love that each student walked away with their memories packed on the outside, and a whole bunch of nice compliments from their classmates on the inside. This is a definite keeper in my classroom!
If you would like to learn more about this project, click on the picture below or click
HERE.
Cheers-
Mr. Hughes
