Teach up until the kids leave on the last day?

Oh...and this is the child's permanent folder that is kept in the office.

 

I had 5th graders this year, so we have to prepare their folders to go to middle school. Every students is required to have a literacy portfolio, with completed writings, DRA, DRA book graph, and a district level data sheet. These must be combined as a grade level and alphabetized. They must then be broken into stacks by letter, paper banded, and labeled. Their records folder include perm. attendance, report cards, test data, AIPs, any retention or summer school forms, school enrollment forms, immunization records, birth certificates, and any legal or medical documents that have accumulated over the years. If a birth certificate or immunization record is missing, it is my responsibility to contact the parent and get them to bring a copy so the folder can be forwarded. All this information must be complete before I am allowed to leave on the last day.

 

Sarge- Our kids are the same way right now. They are very hyped up, and appear to be checked out. Trying to keep to the schedule as much as possible but there is a ton of redirecting happening which doesn't make it fun for the kids or us. Next week I'd like to do a lot of cooperative activity games. We'll see!

 

These folders sound like portfolios.

 

Cut, you never had to fill out cum folders before? Lucky you!

Our folders are just like the ones described. At the end of the year we had to fill out their grades, attendance, behavior and had to write a comment about the student. Inside the folder we had to supply specific types of documents. It took FOREVER to get a whole class done. AND we were not allowed to take them home, although I know many teachers did because there just wasn't time to do it all at school.

 

We pretty much stopped most routine teaching two weeks ago. I used that time to do my assessments and they did a lot of silent reading of word games. Math centers are the same, but this week they are mostly games. A whole big wrench was throw in my plans when the weather turned over 100 degrees yesterday and today. I put in a movie both days just so they'd sit still, My room was over 100 degrees! Tomorrow we will do some sort of math game time, story and writing reflection and finish up a project we started last week. Combined with a little extra recess and some silent reading that should about take care of the day.

 

I start ending the regular curriculum in the last two weeks. I usually hold out with math longer than language arts. The previous week lots of tests and then during the ending weeks fun activities and a zillion things going one every day.

We have limited time to pack everything in our room for cleaning. The children also have a lot of stuff by the end of the year that needs to packed to go home. The children help with sorting the stuff to go home. They also help with sorting the books and games.

We do a lot of art projects. The children write to members of the staff who are leaving. We do interesting math projects. We do special buddy class time. The children do a lot of visiting with each other. We do lots of story reading. We play lots. One of the big goals I have in first grade is social skills and separation is an important thing to learn about in a calm way. We work a lot on various arguments and we vote on all sorts of things for the class decisions that come up as the children start feeling more emotionally unsettled. They work on letting each other know how sad they might be about parting without hitting them or calling them names.

 

We had a HUGE end of the year project that went up until the the last week. So the last few weeks was a combination of regular classes and project. The the last week we had award assembly, field day ( which is the entire day)& cleaning.

We showed a movie one day because we needed to do 200 perm folders ( each one takes at least 5 min or more to complete), we also need to do a end of year checklist that is 20 items long . These had to be done between 7:30 AM and 3:30 PM ( our normal school day) so I feel no guilt for showing a movie because we needed to get them done. We also return our keys at 3:30 on the last day so we dont have the option to just come in on our own time to accomplish this.


Also I agree with Sarge, I will do this work on PAID time not my time. If they would give us a work day I would be happy to clean out my room and work on files on that day!

 

Our portfolios just have assessments and student work.

It's fascinating how things differ across the country.

 

I had a long reply to this but I decided it was hijacking the thread. This is an interesting topic! I decided to open a new thread.

http://forums.atozteacherstuff.com/showthread.php?t=140568

 

We added 8 days to the end of the our school year due to too many calamity days. Our state testing takes place at the end of April (I hate that!). So, for the entire month of May, it becomes increasingly difficult to motivate some of our students, parents, and staff because afterall, "We've already been tested on what we should know for third grade." Attendance goes down, parent requests for in-class parties and "fun days" goes up. It's a battle. Mix in our spring music concert, field day, PTO fun day, and I will admit that the level of learning is staggering.

I have a fellow teacher who does worksheets up until the last day. I'm not a big fan of that. Worksheets have their place (not just in the trashcan) and I use them in my classroom but once the testing is over, I rarely use them. She does not teach in a tested grade so I think she in some ways feels pressure throughout the year whereas I feel a huge relief after the tests are finished.

We spent the last month completing authentic learning tasks. My students created scale drawings for what my classroom arrangement should be next year, found the perimeter, area, and volume of our classroom, wrote "grant" proposals for school improvement ideas, analyzed the statistics of a kickball game, etc. This is when I get to review everything we've learned and put it into the context of the outside world. I enjoy facilitating these activities even if they do take more time than ripping out a worksheet page.

I will admit that on Monday, I had 3 students. We did clean our classroom a bit, organized bookshelves by genre, and they had a movie and popsicle party with older students. There is only so much you can do when your numbers are so low.

Very interesting question!

 

We actually had to cut of grades for the report cards a full week BEFORE the end of the school year, and the kids knew it! I don't know how they found out, but they did. We ended up doing fun science activities (like zapping a pickle to make it glow) and cleaning, watching history vidoes and taking "extra physical fitness breaks" those last 5 or 6 school days before field day which is the day before the last day.

 

We took our state testing at the beginning of May. At that point, I had taught all California State Standards (in language arts and math). Thus, after testing, we did a lot of review and I pre-taught some of the things they'll learn in third grade.

Since last week was the final week of school (and Monday was a holiday--Memorial Day), I don't think I really did any teaching. We had the Talent Show, Field Day, End-of-Year Awards Assembly, and we went on a field trip. It was a great week.

Anyway, I guess my point is that we're not expected to teach until the last day of school. :thumb: