Creative Lesson Cafe: Five for Friday~ End of the Year Crafts and Fun!

There will be only one more Friday for me this year so I thought I'd get with the program here while I still can share some classroom fun! It's been a while since I have had any time to get together a Five for Friday post. So much goes on during a week, that I hardly know where to start! Things are winding down and there has been a hodge podge of activity in the classroom~ some academic but mostly fun!

The last mega bulletin board of the year was finished and hung which was a huge mission accomplished. When coordinating it with three other classrooms, it takes a while for us to all craft, write and then hang the work! MEGABOARD spans the length of the hallway. It turned out great!The kids did such a nice job with the writing to tell about the "write" stuff from they learned in second grade! Our school is big on using Thinking Maps for prewriting, so it was the first time they used a four square organizer with transition words.

I also was able to use my new circle letters for the first time to make a BIG title that really pops!

Because of the long holiday weekend, we finished up some of our Memorial day activites that carried over on Tuesday. The students made this cute I heart the flag craftivity from A Cupcake for the Teacher.

We also sported these headbands to show our patriotism!

The badge pattern is from an old resource book by Carson Dellosa.

The children have been learning about landforms in social studies. We worked our our little landform pictionary books too. I have plans to redesign this during the summer and will share it with you!

Between all of the fun, I have been busy with testing. I wish DRA would just go away. At the level most of my second graders are working at, the test includes a great deal of writing and it takes FOREVER. The district sets the grade level benchmark, but we take the students to their highest level, often giving up to four very time-consuming tests to find it. We assess with a total of three measures, three times a year, in the area of reading using DRA, Star and MAP.

The Sterilite container in the photo is great for storing assessments both finished and those that the students need to finish. I have stacks of DRAs from the year inside. I also like to work smart and have my ipad next to me and enter data for fluency, nonfiction text features, comprehension and retellings immediately after testing so it is all fresh in my head.