Wrapping Up a School Year-Finishing Strong

Hey Educators!

I feel like it's been forever since I  last posted....probably because it has been since summer. Once the school year starts, it is easy to put all of your energy into your classroom, family, and everything else going on. This year has been a HUGE adjustment for me. Although I have taught many years and this is my third year teaching fifth grade, it was really different working under the middle school model. In this model, I taught 4 sections of ELA to 120 squirrely fifth graders.  Now that we are finishing our SBAC testing and planning for the end of the year, I'm curious on your thoughts about how to maintain a strong attitude about school as the days countdown.

I've always had a mentality of "Finish Strong". I got this from Teach Like a Champion and one of my first schools I worked in. It was important to maintain the same high expectations and quality in the classroom for a couple of reasons. First, who wants to make up puzzle worksheets and word searches for the last four weeks of school? Believe me, there are some teachers that are completely okay with this, but for me, it seems to be more work pretending to keep students engaged and calm than actually doing it.  Second, there tend to be more behavior issues as we begin releasing the reigns of our classroom because it is the end of the year. So how do you keep students engaged and making them and their parents feel like what you're doing in the classroom is valid?

I am speaking as an intermediate elementary teacher but this most certainly can work in any grade level. After testing, I begin preparing my students for the next grade level. Everything I give them to work on, I remind them that we are preparing for sixth grade and beyond. We get into some novels in each of my classrooms and we begin thinking in a higher level way.  In our middle school, we use a program called, Spring Board. Although fifth grade doesn't use this, we are exploring introducing our fifth graders to this program as a way to intensify what they do this year and give them a taste of next year.

Doing these highly engaging and more challenging lessons through the curriculum sends a strong message to the students and parents. In my grade level we have to do state testing, but if we stop teaching after the test, we are saying that we teach to the test. If we continue to push our students past the testing benchmark time frame, we are showing them that we want them to be successful on more than just a test.  It isn't easy, students begin to check out and we have to constantly reel them back in, but I'm willing to do it to maintain the structure and academic ambience in my classroom.  How do you finish the school year?

Aside from this, I am going to begin turning my blog into a VLOG. This will put you in my classroom live and ready to see my class set up and works. I will still post my vlog videos here, but you will be able to hear me versus just read me. Can't wait for this exciting change.

Until next time...