End of the Year Gifts

The end of the year is coming fast, and my students and I are ready for some rejuvenation! The eighth graders graduated on the 19th and had their last day of school on Friday with the banquet. This coming week will be the final week of classes, and the following week only has two days! We will have a day of cleaning and a day at the park. 

Every year I look to send my students off with a bang. Pinterest now makes that a lot easier. I tweaked some ideas there to create these little beauties. 

These end of the year gifts cost less than fifty cents each! I made the labels on my computer.

I found some scrap booking paper at a rummage sale a while back and used that to make the back of the labels. The Krazy straws are from the Dollar Tree. I wasn't going to use the water bottles at first, but I eventually decided to because I thought they would add a nice touch. 

The hardest part was figuring out how to attach the straw to the bottle. I decided to use a small piece of tape to adhere the straw to the side of the bottle.  

Graduation Gifts

Have you ever noticed that picture frames LIE? When a frame says it holds a 5x7 picture, what it usually means is, "I'm sure you didn't really want to remember the stuff around the edges! If it was really important, you should have gotten a bigger frame!" This has recently been an issue while preparing for the 8th grade graduation.

The 8th graders graduating is a big deal at St. Mary School. We really want them to know that we will miss them next year! The 7th graders play a big part in helping us send them off to high school on a good note. As the 7th grade advisor, I have been busy helping my students plan the banquet. I spent some time at the Dollar Tree looking for decorations on Sunday. I found some graduation picture frames to use for the place settings at the banquet. Inside the frames, I put a word cloud I made at Tagul.com. The seventh graders helped by going around to various students and staff at St. Mary's and asking for adjectives to describe the 8th graders. I told them to write down every adjective, even repeats. the cool thing about Tagul is the more a word is used, the bigger it appears in the cloud. 

I typed the adjectives (and some nouns) into a word document. So the names would be the biggest words in the cloud, I typed the student's name three times. Then copied and pasted the list into the tag source at Tagul. Then I made the colors as close as possible to the class colors the students had picked (tropical blue and tropical green). Finally, I saved the files on my computer so they could be printed, which brings me back to my earlier point. 

The first time I printed the clouds, I made them 5x7 because the frames were 5x7 frames. BIG MISTAKE. The edges of the cloud were cut off! I also didn't have the box checked for the picture to fit in the frame. Anyway, when I printed them as 4x6 prints, they worked perfectly!