Bouncing Through 3rd Grade: Calming the chaos

Welcome to the Calming the Chaos Blog Hop hosted by 2peasandadog.

All of us bloggers have come together to share our top tips for making the last month of school run smoothly. Visit each of our blogs to learn something new and catch a freebie or two!

Happy Hopping

The end of the year can be very difficult. Kids are done...teachers want to be done. But, we aren't done! How do we keep our kids activly learning during this time? Here are a few things that I do to help my students. Every year, our school has a Celebration of the Learning and the Arts a few weeks before school is out. Students put together a portfolio of a years worth of learning. They spend some time looking through their work and reflecting on it. Some of the reflections that they do are: I enjoyed this activity because.... This activity was difficult for me but.... I'm most proud of this piece because... I LOVE hearing my students saying "I forgot about that! It was so much fun. Do you remember when we did this?" It's a great way to bring in the year and remind them of where they were and how far they have come.

Something new that I'm doing this year is in addition to the portfolios, I'm having the students work in groups and create posters for each subject area, highlighting all the things that we have done. Again, the students work together and go through their books and journals and remember the activities that they had done. We are just in the process of doing this. I can't wait to post pictures of how they turn out!

Lastly, I always do a compliment quilt with my students. Every year, I get about 6 stickers that have my students school picture on it. I rarely use them all, so each student puts a sticker in the middle of their compliment quilt and then everyone in the class writes a compliment to that student and then colors it in. The kids love seeing this.