End Of Year Celebrations… Distance Learning Style!

The end of the school year is just a couple of weeks away! If we were in the classroom, I would be in full-on planning mode, thinking about practicing our readers theater skits, choosing songs to perform, and organizing potluck sign-ups.

But with social distance orders still very strict here in the Bay Area, the possibility of getting together is definitely out of the question. So that leaves us teachers with the task of doing some creative thinking to make sure our kiddos still feel honored and excited at the end of this school year. Here are some creative ideas that my co-teacher and I have been working on for our 2020 first grade final celebration:

Zoom Party

We decided to have a Zoom party for our last day of first grade. We'll invite students and their families to join us for an hour online to celebrate the end of the year. We'll start off with of our favorite class songs that we've learned throughout the year. Then we'll play some fun Zoom games, such as swingman, howdy neighbor, or MadLibs. Then we'll use breakout rooms to put families together in small groups to share their final fiction stories that they published!

Slideshow

I'm starting to compile a slideshow using pictures of different places in our school and our classroom. I also have a lot of pictures of the students learning playing together in our classroom from earlier in the year, so I'll put those in too. Finally, I am going to reach out to families and see if they have any pictures of their children with classmates. Then I'll put them all together into a slideshow with some of our school songs in the background. We'll play it at the end of our Zoom celebration on the last day of school to celebrate our year together.

Dress-Up Themes

Every morning in our Zoom circle time meetings during the last week of school, we have a dress-up theme! We are thinking of including pajamas and stuffies day (although some of them are always in their pajamas!), crazy hair day, fancy day, and costumes day. It will be optional, but I think a lot of kids will get really excited about the idea of dressing up!

Drive-By Pick Up

We have a lot of art materials, projects that never made it home, and some fun goodies we want to give to our students. To give families the opportunity for an in-person wave and chat with the teachers, we are organizing a drive-by pick up for our students. We'll have a two-hour window for families to come by and get their goodie bags. Their bags have their projects from art class, materials for a few more art projects to do at home, gift books, and their class T-shirts. We're so excited for the opportunity to see our students, hand off their bags, and say hello (from a safe six feet away of course)!

Class T-Shirts

One item going into their drive-by goodie bags is a class T-shirt. We designed a shirt that says “First Grade Room 9, 2019-2020” on the front. On the back it says “Growing together, even when we're apart” and then it lists all of the students' first names. We always paint class T-shirts at the end of each year, and we usually have the kids all sign each other's shirts. So we decided to continue the tradition, but this time we printed all the names for the kids. But we still left a big blank area for painting the shirt, and we included 4 colors of fabric paint in their bags.

Group Photo Message

We decided to hop on the group photo message trend! First I created a message that is 22 words long (the number of students we have in our class). Then I assigned each student a word. Their instructions were to write the word in big bubble letters and decorate it, then photograph themselves holding it up. Then I took all of their photos and put them together in the right order and make it into a single image. They won't know what the whole message is going to be we show them the final picture during our Zoom party on the last day of school!

We're really excited to make this end of the year special for our students, and to celebrate the amazing ways they've risen to the challenge of these extraordinary circumstances!

What are your plans for celebrating the end of the school year?
xoxo
Laura