In her marvelous book Growing Readers, Kathy Collins recounts the bittersweet feelings so many of us experience in late May or June, as our time with this year's crop of kids is coming to a close.

In early June, Kathy is observing a group of her eight- and nine-year-old students on the playground playing "Titanic," which mostly involves a lot of running around and squealing "iceberg ahead!" Kathy stays on the edge of the group, until she can't resist the lure of joining in the fun:

After watching for a little while, I couldn't help myself. I approached the group.

"Can I play?" I asked.

The action stopped. The Titanic kids looked at me for a couple seconds and then looked at each other. After what seemed like too long, Victoria (who wasn't about to relinquish her role as Rose to anybody) said, "Yeah, Ms. Collins, you can be a dead body."

"Over here, you can have this spot," Raul said, pointing to the ground under the slide. The other kids looked around and nodded, and then they all went back to their roles.

A dead body? That's all?

Earlier in the year, my children nagged me to play tag with them, challenged me to race across the monkey bars, begged me to lift them up the side of the jungle gym, and otherwise hung on my sleeves at recess time. And now, all I can get is a nonspeaking role in their pretend game? What happened?

But at that moment, on this June day, it became abundantly clear to me what happened. It was the end of the year. My students didn't need me as much or in the same way anymore, and that was okay. With our guidance and teaching, they develop skills and strategies, cultivate relationships, initiate projects and games, and create their own sets of expectations for interactions. Our students' ability to work and play, to read and think independently has grown.

And isn't this what we've been teaching toward all year long?

Kathy Collins, page 251 in Growing Readers from Stenhouse Publishers.

Of course it is...and we can't help but feel a little wistful at how far those students have come, and how easily they can move on as readers, writers, and learners this month with a hug, a word of thanks, and nary a backward glance.

This week we've got some suggestions for last week or even last day activities that provoke thinking about how far we've come with our students as readers and writers, if you still haven't decided on the perfect way to close out those last moments of the year.

And if you're one of those lucky southerners who have already said goodbye to your students and colleagues, many of these activities are easily converted into "getting to know you" events during those first dogs days of August when launching the school year. Plus more from our ongoing series on cleaning and organizing classrooms at the end of the year. Enjoy!

Brenda Power

Editor, Choice Literacy

www.choiceliteracy.com

***Free for All***

The Northeast Foundation for Children has some simple suggestions for helping students think through and write about what they have learned over the year, and challenges that were overcome:

http://www.responsiveclassroom.org/newsletter/19_2nl_3.asp

Scholastic has compiled some classic last day activities, many with a literacy twist. We like the "reflective kites" - talk about a way to soar into summer:

http://content.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=4348

From the Mailbag: A reader wrote in who lost her saved copies of The Big Fresh because of a problem with her hard drive, just before she needed a couple of them for a curriculum committee meeting. If you are ever in the same situation, you can retrieve past issues of the newsletter any time at our archives link:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/public/department62.cfm

The request also reminded us of a product we've been meaning to recommend as we continue our series on cleaning, organizing, and storage. If you move between home and school computers to do your literacy planning, you might be interested in Carbonite, a secure web-based back-up for home computer hard drives that works on any Windows PC. This service is a professional lifesaver - if you are like us, and forget to back up your files routinely, you need never worry about a hard drive failure again. Carbonite encrypts and backs up your data automatically, and stores it securely for a charge of $4 a month. They offer a free 15-day trial if you want to give it a test drive:

https://www.carbonite.com/

(By the way, we don't receive any compensation for this recommendation - we just think this is a terrific product that solves a problem many of us share.)

***For Members Only***

Onward with our series on end-of-the-year clean-up and reorganization. We know everyone's time is short during this stretch of the year, so we've got two quick videos from The Sisters that include tips for considering how work space is organized as you sort and organize materials.

Whether students have desks or cubbies, there is still quite a mess in many of them by this time of year. Joan and Gail help Kelly think through how to rearrange materials in student storage areas:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/members/365.cfm

Certainly a fireman who pulls a child out of a burning building is a hero. But surely a teacher who is willing to have her messy desk filmed by a crew of five as it is cleaned and reorganized qualifies as a profile in courage, too. If you've got a mountain of student papers, gifts, lesson plans, memos from the office, used post-its, spare kleenex boxes and who knows what else on your desk crying out for a clean-up, you'll appreciate this five-minute time-lapse video where new teacher Carrie excavates and redesigns her desk area for better access to literacy resources:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/members/364.cfm

Finally, from the archives, we've got Joan and Gail's templates of quick tips for redesigning classroom space:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/members/142.cfm

That's all for this week!