Graduation

I have been absent from the blogging world for a little bit.  Where have I been?  Busy!  Over the past 6 weeks I have had SO MUCH going on!  All happy and fantastic things, but boy have I been side-tracked!  We bought a home, which we are thrilled about!  We then  put our house on the market, sold it and are in the midst of packing up eight years of stuff!  I am trying to de-clutter while I pack, but I have a little bit of trouble 'letting go' so I have been packing everything and figure I will decide if I still need it when we get to the new home.  I am also packing up at school.  The theme in my life would be summed up as MOVING.  The boxes are everywhere!  I`m moving into a temporary (tiny classroom) until my new (humongous) classroom is ready (sometime in the fall), at which point I will move into that classroom.  We are getting Full Time Kindergarten and are anticipated to have around 29 to 30 students in our classrooms (eeek!), so construction will begin to create larger classrooms for us.  So much has happened at school, starting with our Graduation Celebration.  The kids did such a great job singing and reading.  We had a big presentation in the gym for all family members.  Our theme was Reach for the Stars. 

Bottom of the stage.

Pictures on either side of the gym.

Students art work.  Students wrote what they wanted to be when they grew up on the star, had their name in glitter in the center and had their kid picture at the bottom.  This idea came from Peace, Love and Kindergarten.

Here are some random photos of other things we`ve done.

We learned about time and money.  This activity is from the ConGRADulations Unit Alessia Albanese and I created.  

We learned about life on the farm and went to a real life farm.

We stamped our farm thematic words.  This activity is from my Trace, Stamp, Color, Cut and Paste it, Farm theme.

We learned about word families.  Here we are making various words with our playdough.  These mats are from my Play dough Word Fun Word Family Placemats pack.  This pack is huge and has over 200 pages of word family play dough pages.  The kids are having so much fun, they forget they are learning important skills!

We celebrated our Fathers by making them car cards and keychains.  The keychains were from Oriental Trading and were super cheap.  The kids simply colored and wrote messages to dad on the back.

We are also getting ready for next year.  Although our program is changing and we are still trying to figure out what all these changes mean for us, we are still trying to plan ahead.  We have our Kindergarten Memory Books all ready to go.  This is such a special momento of a child`s Kindergarten year.  It captures monthly progress in writing letters, numbers, journal writing and also has special pages to capture memories of friends, losing teeth and so much more!  I have just updated it to include number printing to 30.

Well, one more week left of school!  I am going to miss my littles, who are actually looking bigger and acting much more mature.  They are definitely ready for Grade one.  Well, I had better get some packing done before bed!  Wishing everyone a great start to summer!