What to Do Instead of Summer Homework and My End-of-Year Readiness Guide

This is the time of year where we're not only prepping for the end of school but thinking of what we'll do the same and differently next year. It's funny how those things are intricately tied together. 

I've got a few things for you for end-of-year, summer boosts and gathering all those thoughts and ideas for next year as well. Wow! That's a lot of stuff, right?! No worries, I'll make it as simple and easy as I can.

End of the School Year Organization

As we near the end of the year, it can be difficult to keep track of all the moving parts to get things wrapped up, packed up and ready for summer. Here's my [free] End-of-Year Checklist to help you with that. 

Summer Boosts

While you probably know I'm NOT a fan of summer homework, you might not know this bit. I'm a HUGE fan of sneaky ways to get kids learning and reading without even knowing it's the dreaded "practice" they want to avoid. So here's two items to help you support parents in this quest.

• Sneaky Parent's Guide to Growing Readers  This guide supports parents with simple, proven techniques in helping their children to become committed readers. 
• Creative Parents' Guide to Fun, Effective Summer Learning  It's a fact that engaging in things like puzzles, sudoko, logic puzzles, planning and building things and other creative thinking helps to grow both our brains in general and our problem solving abilities. This kind of learning is worth its weight in gold. 

Sneaky Back-to-School

As you start to pack up and get your year wrapped up, your mind is processing for next year as well. Here's a couple of tricks to help you stay organized and begin to corral those back-to-school thoughts so you can stay focused on your year end teaching and tasks,

• Create a Parts Box: This is a place for all of those odds and ends that you find as you clean up. At the end of each day, have a student or students take the box and put everything where it goes.
• Download my [free] Back-to-School Planning Guide if you haven't already [or make one of your own].
• Create a bin just for all of your back-to-school items you come across as you're cleaning up that you're going to want later on. If they're just thoughts of things you want to try or do differently, write them on a post-it or paper and put it in this bin. Toss in that planning guide as well.

That's it! Grab all the goodies and get busy. 

Lisa