Time Stands Still with Lots of gLuE!

Well, I am one day away from the end of the school year! I will greet my students tomorrow morning and spend 2 more hours with them before they officially turn into 4th graders (and I start crying). I have a lot to tell you about all of the great things we've done this past week, but I will save that for tomorrow when the school year is really over. For now I just want to tell you about the gifts I made for my students!

Yesterday my students had their end of the year showcase. My brother and I wrote a really funny play that they performed for their parents, and then their parents stayed for a big class breakfast. Before I invited everyone to fill a plate, I presented each one of my students with a personalized scrap book full of their published writings, and also of pictures I have taken of each one of them this year. Making each book was a daunting task, but the looks on their faces as they sat with their parents and looked through the books were priceless.

Here is the file box where I kept all of their published writing throughout the year. In my class, "published" means the writing has been drafted, edited, revised, typed, and mounted on colored paper. The hundreds and hundreds of pictures that I ordered arrived last week and I filed each picture in the student folder where it belonged. 

The next step was to cut down all of the writings and place them in the scrapbooks with the pictures. Here is what the floor looked like as I worked on one of the scrap books.

Like everything I do, I made this a family affair :).  Once I got everything placed just so in each book,  my family broke out the glue sticks. They were faithful gluers for literally hours on end, 3 days (and nights) in a row. 
SHOUT OUT: THANK YOU!

Here is the giant stack of finished scrap books! 26 in all, each complete with a letter from me on the inside cover!  

And as usual, my loyal sidekick sat beside for all of the sorting, cutting, organizing and gluing:).

As I passed out the scrap books yesterday I got a little choked up (and no it wasn't because I was finally finished making them). I was overwhelmed by the idea of the school year being over because my students are some of the greatest kids I have ever had the honor of teaching. So I made these books because I know that 20 years from now they'll still have them, and that when they look through them time will stand still. I know that they'll smile at all of our crazy adventures, and that is what made this all worth it.