Five for Friday, May 23

1.  End of Year Party

Today was our end of year party.  Thank goodness for one of my fantastic parent volunteers who came in to help today.  I don’t know what I would have done without her!

First, we did an awards ceremony in class.  I used an awesome End of Year Award packet from Curriculum Castle.  You can grab a copy here.

I sent each kiddo home with a beach bucket that I wrote his or her name on with paint markers.  There were several things in the buckets: some stickers I got from Scholastic, a bookmark, bubbles, markers, and one very special gift.  Of course this special gift HAD to be a book!  After reading it to them today, I gave each kiddo a copy of “The Story of Ferdinand.”  If you’ve never read this story, it’s a sweet story about a bull that doesn’t want to do what the other bulls do.  It’s a fantastic story to talk about how it is OK to be different.

I really do have a quirky group so I felt that this book was perfect for them!  The best part of gifting these books was I that I was able to use my Scholastic points and only had to spend about $16 of my own money to buy the 4 copies I didn’t have enough points for.  Win-win.

2.  Have you ever tried to get all of those super stuck-on name tags off of desks all by yourself?

I thought about doing this myself, then quickly decided the kiddos could help.  The name tags we had at the beginning of the year quickly became worn, so after Christmas break I put nice, new ones on the desks.  However, I couldn’t get the old ones off!  They simply did not want to come off (easily anyway), and I didn’t have the patience to spend a huge amount of time on each one so I just placed the new ones on top of them!

The new ones were only attached using packing tape, so they came off without any trouble.  Then we had to get creative.  I searched google and found a few different suggestions for getting them off.  A lot of teachers recommended using a straight razor blade.  Clearly I could not give my kiddos razor blades, so that was not going to work!  So what did a try?  The end of a dry erase marker!  These were the ones that we had been using all year anyway, so who cared if they got ruined?  It worked like a charm, and after some awesome modeling on my part, it only took about 15 minutes total. I know this daunting task would have taken me hours if I did it myself.  Work smarter, not harder!

If you’re still needing to get yours off, give it a try!

3.  It’s so close!

4.  So true, I just had to include it!

5.  MEXICO!

As a graduation present, the mister and myself will be going to Riviera Maya for 6 days in July!  I am so excited, and I can’t wait to be laying by the pool/beach with a drink in hand while soaking up the rays!

Here’s a pic of where we will be staying.

We are staying at an all-inclusive resort that I went to on a work trip a few years ago.  I think I better be getting myself into the gym more!

Can it be July already??

That’s it for now.  What are your summer plans?