End of the Year Portfolio

Wow.  Are we really halfway through June already???  I think I completely lost a week somewhere.  Thankfully, the dog is still with us.  He's finished a round of meds and it turns out (much to our surprise and the vet's) that we have a pretty healthy fourteen year old dog.  Some antibiotics and probiotics patched him up and now we're back to just monitoring his arthritis.  I'm still fighting The Sinus Infection That Won't Go Away, so I'm also on meds and feeling a little wonky.  Actually, a lot wonky.  (Have I mentioned how much I hate taking medication?)  I'm not even sure they're working.  I think I feel a little better this morning.  Maybe.  Moving on . .  .

We finished Ella's end of the year binder before last week's craziness.  I put some samples of her work from the year along with page protectors in the back filled with extras - roller skating admission cards, brochures for museum exhibits visited, special reports/projects, etc.   I decided to put all of my administrative papers (lesson plans, school calendars, curriculum outlines, etc.) in another binder, and I'll probably keep a larger, ongoing file for those.

We printed a couple of pages from the elementary memory book pages from about.com to put in the front of her book.  We liked the favorites page (also this one) and my friends and future page.

These are my favorite answers that she wrote:

• Next year I plan to:  teach Harper her letters.   (Yep, apparently mom's not doing her job around here.) 

• When I grow up I want to be: a cat farmer    (For real.)

Then I made collages using pictures of projects and activities she did throughout the year.  I made mine in picasa, saved as a .jpg, then printed them as 8x10's and put them in sheet protectors after her favorites pages.   You could also make the collages on one of the printing sites.  I'd check to see which option would be cheaper depending on the available coupon codes.

What I'm doing for next year is setting up an album in picasa (on my computer) for next year's school pictures.  This way, as I load new pics in the computer, I can quickly label the ones I might want to use in next year's collages, saving myself a good bit of work searching through everything at the end of the year.