If the work week is starting to feel like a blurry hand sanitizer-scented haze at the moment, you’re right on schedule. The crush of holiday to-dos (fun and not-so) alongside the slow but insistent slip of student attention spans, plus the inevitable wave of illnesses you’re trying to avoid makes these last few days a challenge. So today I’m hoping I can help by giving you all the moving pieces for an easy and awesome last day.
Start Your Day Before Break with a Book Tasting
Here’s what’s great about a book tasting on the last day: it’s engaging and relaxing, it promotes your classroom reading culture, and it gives students a way to stay pleasantly connected to reading and school through the break.
What’s not to like?
I’ve got everything you need ready to roll, if you can provide the books from your classroom or school library.
Just project the “Winter Book Tasting” slide on your whiteboard, scatter those books across your tables, and give students the graphic organizer to keep track of their favorites as they wander and explore. You can do a quick demonstration of how you might “taste” a book and then let them jump in as you hit play on a winter playlist.
During the tasting, you can circulate and help make book matches, and also check in on any students you need to chat with before break for any reason. Twenty minutes later, everyone will hopefully have found a great book to check out and take home over break.
You can grab the free full curriculum kit right here.
Finish with Snowy Day Poetry Tiles
Chances are, your book tasting won’t take quite the whole period, so I want to give you a creative final wrap-up.
The drag-and-drop snowy day poetry tiles help students let go of their writer’s block and enjoy creating a wintery poem. As words jump out at them from the tiles, they simply pull them into the main part of the slide, eventually forming a poem they might never have expected. It’s like magnetic poetry without all the tiny pieces to keep track of.
Once students have created a poem in the middle, all they have to do is delete the extra words and they’re left with a lovely poem on a lovely background, ideal for you to print into a classroom display or to give back to your students as cards for friends or family members.
You can make your copy of this poetry activity here. And if you fall for the concept, you can find more of these fun poetry tiles kits here.
Ready to Roll
OK, you’re ready to rock that last day! Good luck with all. The. Things. I hope the winter book tasting and snow day poetry tiles will help make Friday a smooth slide into break.
