What's Ahead for Our Final Week Together?

Today the kids and I mapped our final week together. It's coming quickly. Many of the kids have shared their mixed emotions with me while walking to lunch, talking in the classroom, or hanging out at carpool. They're excited to become 4th graders but sad to leave. Our last day will be a rough one. It's hard to spend two whole years together (more than 2,000 hours, if you can believe it)then say goodbye.

Here are our plans for making each day special:

Friday
We'll spend our morning finishing up our Expert Project boards. After lunch we'll have some writing workshop time to work on our final writing pieces of the year. Finally, we'll head out to Splash Day at 1:30.

Tuesday
We'll part of the morning sharing our Expert Projects. There will not be formal presentations. Rather, we'll have a small Share Fair in our room. We'll invite a few classes in and break into halves so that eleven of us will be presenting at a time while the other eleven have an opportunity to browse other projects. We will also have a good chunk of time set aside to wrap up those final writing pieces. In the afternoon we are going to study the list of texts we've read together over the past two years and think of ways to sort these and share the patterns that we see through graphs and tables. Afterward we will conduct a vote to see which texts were our very favorites so we can revisit these during the final few days of school.

Wednesday
We'll start the day by sharing our writing pieces with one another and possibly making one final visit to our Book Buddies in 1st grade. Around 10:00 we'll head out for our 5k walk through the neighborhood. I'm hoping to have the kids bring the school's palm pilots so they can capture pictures of various things we see as part of a scavenger hunt (think: find parallel lines, find an animal in the beginning stages of its life cycle, etc). When we get back we'll order a few pizzas for lunch. I've asked the kids to bring in $3 for this. We'll spend our afternoon writing letters to Skyler's dad thanking him for his correspondence these past few months from Afghanistan.

Thursday
We'll sing a few of our favorite songs, begin cleaning up the room, read a few of our favorite books together, create plans for our summer reading, attend the 5th grade graduation, and come back to our room for our class party.

Friday
Our final day together will be spent cleaning out our things, writing letters to the incoming 2nd graders, performing an appreciation for our departing 5th grade class, sharing a final book or two together, and saying goodbye.