Summer School & I'm leavin' on a Jetplane

I survived!  My husband has been in Japan for two weeks without me and in exactly two hours my plane departs to join him.  Hooray! (For the joining part, not the long flying part)  This week I've been staying with my sister who recently had a baby and teaching summer school.  My school decided to let the teachers have free-reign over their summer school classes this year and I decided to teach a Dinosaur class, a Fairytale class, and a Mystery class.  It has been a lot of fun!  I did a lousy job of snapping photos of all of the fun things we did - but here are just a few:

 We talked about and read LOTS of awesome fairy tales.  Then the kids created their own inside an awesome castle card foldable.

 We talked about lots of fun dinosaurs, wrote about them, drew them, modeled them with clay, and even made our own plaster of paris fossils! 

The kids had a lot of fun with these.  They were tricky for a lot of the kids - but they were thrilled nonetheless.  I had an assortment of flashlights so we turned off all the lights, shut the blinds, and partnered up.  We taped a piece of black construction paper on the wall then ended up using chairs to rest the flashlights on to cast a shadow of the student who was sitting very still in front of the black paper. Then they cut them out and mounted them on paper.  They turned out pretty great and the kids LOVED guessing who each other was.

We made magical wands, plus glittery castles and crowns, but I forgot to photograph those :(

 This picture I added just for fun.  I've been a little bored of my hair recently and I saw a hairstyle sort of like this on Pinterest and thought I'd give it a whirl.  It turned out pretty well considering that I did it all blind.  My favorite part of the photo is my cute kitty, Lucky, who jumped up on the bathroom cabinet to pose for the picture and get the camera flash.  So cute.  

Are you teaching summer school?  How does your school do it?  Is it purely academic review or more like summer camps?

Well I can't wait to hear, but it's TTFN because I'm off to Japan!