Creating an End of the Year Slideshow for Your Students and Families

Happy Sunday, everyone! It's Caitlin, from The Kinder Garden, here to kick off the month of May here at Hello Sunshine! Our theme this month is "Wrap it Up!" and we will be sharing ideas and resources for the end of the school year.

All year long, I take photos of my students in the classroom, at school events, on field trips, spirit days, and everything in between. My team always makes an end of the year slideshow to show to our students' families at our kindergarten promotion ceremony; and it never fails that after every show we always have multiple parents asking how they can get their hands on a copy. Now, it would cost a fortune to provide DVDs of the slideshow to every parent, not to mention hours spent burning and creating all of the discs - and ain't nobody got time for that!

The solution to this problem came to me two years ago when an e-mail crossed my inbox from a company called Smilebox!

Smilebox is an online program you can download to your computer and use to create photo slideshows, invitations, greetings, collages, and more! Their basic program is free to download and use for anyone who wants to use it - but did you know that they give a FREE Premium subscription (normally a $48 value) to teachers? All you have to do is click HERE and submit your application for the Smilebox Teacher's Toolbox by filling out the information box on the right hand side of the page.

In a few days, you'll get an e-mail from them letting you know that you're in! They'll send you a link and a password to download your free subscription, and then you can start creating! They have tons of adorable school-themed templates to create a photo slideshow. I just drag and drop my photos into the sidebar and you choose what order you want your pictures to appear in the slideshow. You can add music, text, captions, and more to make it personalized for your class!

It's so easy to create! Once I finish creating it, I e-mail it out to all of my parents. I can't tell you how many e-mails I have gotten back from them thanking me for sharing photos from the year so that they can look back at them any time they want to see all of their memories from the school year. Just the other day, I got a notification that someone had viewed their slideshow... from 2013! It's the gift that keeps on giving for years to come!