0! Blast-off!

We are officially finished with school for the year!  Yay! 

My students weren't surprised by my present of books... they figured it out beforehand.  They were super excited about the covers!  I heard them arguing over whose cover was the best.  Then I tried to get them to take a picture... that didn't go over so well, as you can see...

So I tried again.  But the boy in the middle with the basketball net on his shirt was counting and when he got to zero, he left.  Eh, whatever.

A few moms came in to take pictures of their kids with me.  Both boys were kind of embarrassed doing the whole "Mooom" with the eye roll.  But they sucked it up anyway.  One of the 6th grade girls had actually wanted to take a picture with me and had a classmate take one with her phone.

I got a surprising amount of presents on this last day of school: a visa gift card, one of those 3D bookmarks (with an eagle on it), a chapstick called "eos" (she put it as the center of a flower that said "thank you for letting me 'bloom' this year", how cute!), and a little pot of flowers.

We cleaned up our desks in record time... before the beginning of the day bell rang.  So I had them clean up the classroom a bit... take down posters, clean whiteboards, wipe down surfaces, etc.  Then we had a "play any games you want" party.  We had a group playing checkers, another playing Twister, a third playing Apples to Apples, and I played Pictionary with another group.  This took us until our hymnsing and chapel.  We all made it back to school and into the classroom where I passed out their wrapped books.  My little dawdler was still cleaning out her desk, so she didn't get to open hers with the rest of the class, but it didn't take over ten minutes after we prayed/dismissed for her to finish!  Much shorter than last year's half hour/hour.  Of course, she came rushing back to the classroom less than five minutes later because she misplaced one of her awards.  Her words, "I guess I need to keep better track of my stuff," as she digs through all the hymnals on the bookshelf.  She never did find it.  Must be in with all the other stuff she crammed in her bag.

And so we had our staff meeting, wrapped up the year, and now I'm working on grade reports and all the little tidying up we need to do after school is over.  It turns out there are two or three other families (with 4-6 kids a piece) that are looking at sending their kids to our school.  I could be getting even more new students! Though it seems like most of the potential students are in the younger grades.  It makes me hesitate to completely dismantle my classroom if there are going to be people looking at it.  Since my plan is to work at school every Tuesday this summer, I should be fine leaving it for another few weeks.

Plans for this summer: work at the library in Fulda (I start on Saturday!) and teach the library's Summer Reading Program, play sand volleyball in Courtland on Tuesdays (and work at school).  One of my college friends and I are planning a camping trip for next weekend or the weekend after that, depending on when I work at the library.  The end of July brings my trip to El Salvador through ThriventBuilds and Habitat for Humanity (one of my cousins is going along too!). 

Those things should keep me pretty busy... and of course I plan to read a ton of books. :)