End of School

One of my 5th grade student's gave me this bouquet of flowers the last week of school as a thank you for being a teacher. I was so honored. It was the first time I've ever received flowers from a student, and I was so touched by their generous gift and that they even thought of me. 

Ammon has had an awesome 7th grade year. He received 4.0 GPA for the whole year, and we are so proud of him for it! He loved English, History, and Math, but struggled with Art/Health and Science. P.E. and Band were easy classes, and he enjoyed the academic break they gave him each day. He still participated in G&T (Gifted & Talented), and his teachers spoke highly of him at Parent Teacher Conferences. He competed in 3 school sports this year: Cross Country, Basketball, and Track, and had practices most of the year after school. He played with the Pep Band at sports games, and attended Clinic & Festival with the concert band, too. He has a great group of friends, for which we are so grateful! We are so glad that he had a great year!

 

Cross-Country

 

 7th Grade Basketball Team

Track

Jonah and Micah had a good year in 3rd grade with Mr. Lund as their teacher. It took a couple months for them to get settled in. They got A's in all their subjects, made new friends, and finally stopped getting into trouble! Jonah accidentally broke one of the school's windows playing kickball last fall, and Micah had a few behavior problems that Mr. Lund brought to my attention--including a report where Micah wrote 30 times on a paper "I will follow {stupid} directions the first time I'm asked". And then he got in even more trouble for interjecting the word "stupid" every time he wrote the sentence. I was grateful they had Mr. Lund, because he's very patient and is very organized and is a great teacher. As a class, they got to do some fun activities--like create homemade instruments, and make gifts and deliver them to the senior care center, and earn extra recess each week. Also, I was able to volunteer in their classroom once a week as a guest reader, and I read three of Roald Dahl's books to their class this year. I really enjoyed having the opportunity to read to them each week!

 

Their last project of the year was Idaho animal reports--Jonah had the coyote.

 

By default, Micah's report was on the Painted Turtle--it wasn't his 1st or 2nd choice, but it was a very interesting animal to learn about!

 

This is the class with their homemade instrument projects--Jonah made a guitar out of a shoe box & rubber bands and Micah made a xylophone out of paper towel rolls & spoons.

Kanyon survived his Kindergarten year! He struggled at the beginning of the year with everything new--he does so well with routines and schedules, and has a hard time with chaos and new places and new people. There was a couple of times that he had full meltdowns, and was sent to the time-out room in the office and was kicking and screaming and crying and banging his head and throwing things and ripping up papers. It was difficult for me to see him like this at school. It took us a while to understand what was throwing him so out of whack that he would become so upset. I know I mentioned it in a previous post, but doing drawings during art time in addition to high noise levels in the classroom both really bothered him. I spoke with other special ed. teachers, to refer him to get extra help, but he didn't really qualify because he's so bright and intelligent, so we needed to help him learn to deal with his behavior problems in the classroom instead.

It wasn't until about mid-November that he started improving and doing better. He would still have times where he refused to do drawings, or times when he tried to do his letters so perfectly and would make a mistake and the eraser didn't take it all away and he'd get frustrated, or when the classroom noise was too much, that he would have mini-meltdowns and struggled to maintain his composure, but it was SOO much better than it was at the beginning of the year. I'm so glad that he improved over the course of the year--at one point last fall I considered withdrawing him from school and quitting my job and homeschooling him. I didn't know what else to do to help him! It really helped that Josh was able to pick him up during the winter months and bring him home, because Kanyon had very calm afternoons and he started getting in a daily routine, and school became much more manageable for him then. He also started making friends, which isn't easy for him to do, and a little boy in his class named Keagan was such a good friend for him--he was kind, and patient, and easy to get along with.

Kanyon is very smart, and Mrs. Foote said he always did the calendar time the best--he remembered the days, the month, and the season better than any other student. The lady that comes and does the letter & sounds testing also told me that Kanyon had the highest score of any other Kindergartener this year. He also LOVES math, and really excelled at it. He really enjoyed library time, because he got to check out new books, and he like coming to Music class, because he has a talent for playing music and singing. I think that knowing his strengths helped us to encourage him, and to keep his focus on the positive side of Kindergarten, which also helped him to succeed this year!

 

Kanyon & his buddy Keagan

 

The last week of school, Mrs. Foote's afternoon & morning class came at the same time--there was a lot of little students in one room!

 

 

Next year it will be Ammon's last year in the middle school, Jonah and Micah's last year in the elementary school, and Kanyon's first year in all-day school! My boys are growing up so fast...it's hard to fathom!