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Making end-of-the-year memory books
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The end of the school year can be an unsettling time for everyone. Little folks who are experiencing their first academic year may need some help processing the transition from student to summer camper, or learning how to say goodbye to beloved teachers and familiar routines. While the older children may have yearbooks or banquets, early childhood students will relish the chance to relive their favorite memories – and polish their writing and drawing skills – by creating original memory books. These simple, stapled-together books will serve as highly personal keepsakes of the first school experiences, and give the students the chance to reminisce as the year draws to a close.
Designing the pages
My teaching mantra has always been “Keep it simple!” Some of you enterprising teachers and parents out there may want to get wild with scrapbooking ideas, three-dimensional foamie shapes and other types of awesome embellishments, and if so, more power to you. For the rest of us mere mortals, some reproducible templates and a big bucket of crayons will do the trick. Remember, the main goal is to help kids commemorate their academic and social experiences, not to make the most fantastic art book that your school has ever seen. To make the templates yourself, just be sure to plan plenty of room for kids’ large handwriting and lots of space for pictures and artwork. Kids also get a big kick out of signing their autographs in their friends’ completed memory books, so consider adding a blank page for that.
Ideas and prompts to get things started
The key is to make the prompts meaningful for the students. The more specific you are, the better stories they will come up with. So instead of prompting kids to write and draw about their best day of school, try asking them to describe the funniest thing that ever happened in the cafeteria, or the most surprising thing that ever happened during story time. For the younger students, it may be helpful to have a group discussion of one prompt that will help generate ideas and get the creative juices flowing. Teachers may even want to use the time to demonstrate how to complete a sample page, thinking aloud and modeling the writing process step by step.
Finding the time
The end of the year is chock-full of assessments, school performances, field days, field trips, and celebrations. Although it may seem like a challenge to find the time to do a project like this amidst all the turmoil, if you only attempt to complete one page at a time (rather than a whole book of memories) it may become more possible. It’s a great inside activity for a rainy day with no outdoor playtime, and also can be a terrific independent seatwork activity while you do some one-on-one evaluation or small group lessons. It is worth finding the time to talk with your kids about the good times you’ve shared together through the year, and to help them make plans for the summer and beyond.
