Mindsets in the Classroom WRAP UP!

Are you ready? Let's do this! Mary Cay Ricci makes it infinitely clear that although we obviously cannot control many variables in our students' lives, we certainly possess the ability to make a meaningful impact on them in the classroom to inspire a growth mindset! We can conspire to inspire our students by encouraging them to reach small goals everyday to boost their confidence and grow their growth mindset muscles!  As we wrap up our book study we would like to thank you so much for joining us, and we hope you have enjoyed this Mindsets In the Classroom adventure! Below is a free poster for you to print and post near your work area in your classroom to remind you to help your kids soar!
Conspire to inspire growth mindset!

•Value effort, persistence, and perseverence
•Praise effort over intelligence
•Small goals & wins boost confidence
•School improvement plans should include growth mindset goals/focus
•School staff meetings should include growth mindset talk/focus
•Parent-Teacher conferences should include education/talk of growth mindset
•Classrooms should be non-threatening, and fear free of embarrassment from mistakes or failures - in fact they should be celebrated for evidence of trying and working hard to learn & grow!

Thanks again for reading with us this summer!

Wrapping it Up!

Welcome to our fun blog everyone!!  I hope that you enjoy our blog, as much as I have enjoyed getting to know the ladies behind this amazing blog!  These ladies have gone from teachers I stalked followed on IG, TPT and blogs, to now being some of my favorite blogging ladies!!  I have already learned so much from this group, and I am so excited to be part of it!!

I'm even more excited because this weekend I will get to spend the weekend with some of these amazing ladies!!

Today I am excited to share with you some of my favorite ways to Wrap Up the School Year!!

In third grade I love keeping my kids busy until the very end, because if you don't, you will loose them!!  To do this I give them an incentive every day.  Some of these incentives cost me money, some of them cost me nothing!!  I love doing our Fun Days in May calendar because they look forward to it just as much as I do!

I have a great, fantastic, wonderful set of parents who are more than willing to help us out!  They have provided so much for us to do during these sixteen days!!

To help display these fun ideas I post them on our back bulletin board!  I have every day in an envelope and then at the end of the day I open the next day's envelope.  My kids do a drum roll, and then go silent as they await to see what the next envelope will say!

Another way I helped to get into the end of the school year mood this year was to work on some awesome end of the school year lap books and bucket lists!

These lap books come from another talented Hello Sunshine Teacher, Ashlyn over at The Creative Classroom!  I LOVE them!!  My kids have had a lot of fun putting them together, and it is amazing how different each one looks!

I also started working on my end of the year gifts for my kiddos!  I found these awesome cups from Walmart, in my colors of course, and knew that I wanted to use them for something!!  I went to the Dollar Tree and got the crazy straws, ran to Fry's to get the koolaid and I was in business!!

$15 for 24 presents!  Score!!

I hope that you have found some fun ways to celebrate the end of your school year!  If you're looking for more great ideas feel free to check out our link up, and share your ideas too!!  Plus come back all month as we share more ideas with you!!

End-of-the-Year Class Books and Keepsakes

As many of you know, one of my favorite mentor texts to use in my classroom is

There are so many ways to use it in the classroom!

One of my favorite ways is to use it for these fun

End-of-the-Year projects.

The Important Thing About XXX Grade

Have students thin about the most important things about being in this grade, as if giving advice to incoming students.  Next, have them complete the frame and illustrate.  Bind into a class book and share on the last day of school, AND save it to read to your new students the first week of school next year.  It will become a favorite in your classroom library, especially if you do it over several years.  It is so fun to compare them!

The Important Things About US!

For this one, have students think about how they want their classmates to remember them.  Then they complete the frame and illustrate.  I always make copies of the completed pages, along with the autograph pages, into keepsake booklets for each student.  They can have their friends autograph their books.

I have also used their text and added photos of each child to make a slideshow, and copied to DVD's for the kids.  See Caitlin's post here about how to create slideshows using SmileBox.

You can grab either one of these files for free, this week only, by clicking on the images above.  If you miss them as freebies, you can find them in my TPT Store.

For more End-of-the-Year ideas, visit our Pinterest board.

Follow Hello's board Hello Sunshine - End of the Year Ideas on Pinterest.

Summer Break Count Down

The end of the year is coming too soon!  I only have 12 days left with my sweet kiddos.  Luckily, I am looping up to 3rd grade with them next year and I couldn't be more excited!

Do you need a fun and motivational activity to get you your kiddos to the end of the school year? I made a banner to help us count down the days to Summer Break!  On the back of each pennant is an activity for us to do that starts with each letter.  

Last year, I used my Silhouette to cut out the banner and the letters.  Then, I printed the activities on labels and stuck them on the back.  I used an arrow to help keep track of what day we were on.

This year, I made a digital banner and added a behavior management piece.  

Each day leading up to Summer Break, they have the opportunity to earn a letter and the special activity that is written on the back.  Every morning they start with four suns on the board.  Depending on how they behave, they can either lose or earn suns.  At the end of the day, if they have all four suns, they will earn their letter.  Of course you can modify this in order to meet the needs of your class.  I've done variations of this behavior management activity, and when I have a really difficult class, they only need to have one sun on the board to earn their reward.  Whatever works for you!

These are the activities I came up with.  Feel free to use or adjust any of these activities.  Some letters took a little extra thought and creativity to make work.  :)   

S - Sidewalk chalk {I bring a bucket of chalk from the Dollar Tree and let them go to town on the playground.}  
U - U need a brain break {enter GoNoodle!}
M - Mind games {hangman, memory, and other random games}
M - Mystery Box {I bring a special treat in a box and have them guess what it is using only yes/no questions.  It is usually something tasty!}
E - Extra Recess
R - Read outside {I let them bring their library books and my books, then we read around the courtyard.}

B - Bubbles {I bring them bottles of bubbles from the Dollar Tree and let them play.  One year I made homemade bubbles with dish soap and used pipe cleaners as the wand.  It was cheap, easy, and fun.}

R - Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament

E - Eat a treat {again, I bring in something special and delicious!}

A - Airplane contest {I provide the paper, they design their own paper airplanes.}

K - Krazy dance party {Blast some Kidz Bop and let them dance away!  Freeze dance is one of our favorites.}

! - Ice Cream Party! {I bring the ice cream, they bring the toppings!  If I'm adventurous, we make ice cream in a bag and use some of Cara's fun activities.}

You can download yours for free here!

Wrapping Up the Year With Hello Sunshine

As you may have already guessed from the title of this post, our theme this month is wrapping things up for the end-of-the-year.

To join in the fun, just grab this button to include in your post:

...and nab this handy template to organize your end-of-the-year

 ideas, activities, links, and books:

(To use this template, save it as an image to your computer.  Use it as the background for a power point page, use text boxes to add your info, and then save your whole new creation as a PDF and/or as an image to include in your blog post.)

Next step:
Link up with us!
(Please link directly to your Sharin' a Little Sunshine post url to keep things easy to find.)  Product links within a post are fine, but please no direct product links.

And the optional-but-awesome final step is to visit other linked-up blogs... and leave some love!

Hang in there!

The end is in sight!

An InLinkz Link-up

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!