Summer School

Whew! I haven't posted about summer school yet! With summer school, trying to get my classroom set up for next year before we leave in July, and just enjoying the rest of my lazy time, I haven't blogged about it!

I LOVE IT! I have six sweet kiddos...seriously, we fly through the material. The first day, I had to scramble to come up with something else for them to do in the afternoon because we had done EVERYTHING and I didn't think we would get to it all! So, it's really nice to be able to do everything we need to do. Plus, there are times when we just sit and chat for a minute, and I can get to know them better.

I have 4th graders, all of who are English proficient except for one. It's new territory for me, as I don't have an ELL endorsement, but we are getting along. I have the students for about 4 hours, and we follow a 20-day math program and an ELL reading curriculum from National Geographic. Now that I have gotten used to it, I'm at the point where I'm trying to spice it up a a bit :)

One of our vocabulary words was weave, and so we got to work on a weaving project that they seemed to really enjoy. Some of them did have trouble with the "over, under, over, under" pattern, but it wasn't TOO easy for them that they were bored or thought it was baby-ish. Doing art projects with 6 4th graders is so much more relaxed than 25 third-graders!

Anyway, that's the update so far. My real classroom is coming along. I am going with a butterfly theme for next year. I'm not a big theme person, but I do like to have something fun going on for the beginning of the year. I'm thinking we'll do those tie-dyed coffee filter butterflies to decorate my door. I also saw a cute bulletin board somewhere in blogland that had pics of the kids with "From the desk of..." to hang their work on. I'm thinking I might do "From the cocoon of..." hehehe...let me know if you have any other butterfly ideas for 3rd graders!

Megan