End of the Year Rituals to Honor and Heal

0:00 these rituals will certainly be a gift of love that you can give the children in your classroom so for instance if you know that someone is not going to come back the following year what you can do is have every single person in the classroom write a note on how they will remember that child if they can write they can dictate the sentence and make a drawing they can send them to you and you can put it together and make a book

0:27 something that might look like this with whatever the children the children's thoughts are you can do the same for uh staff members that are not going to come back the following year if you're an administrator you can have every member of the start of the staff write something that says how they will remember that staff member there are books that you can download online that you can create together with

0:57 your classroom and again if you have work with older children then you have them write if you work with younger children you want to have them draw or have them do both whatever works for you it's time to adapt the things as best as you can let me just read to you the first page of the book so this book says it's an I will remember book our time together is complete getting to know each other has been a treat our

1:25 year has been full of learning and laughter and now it's time for the adventures to that come after we grew and we smiled and we had some difficult times too one thing is for certain we will always remember you and then you put pictures and comments about memories of the school year that they share with you which you can then send to them digitally digitally you can also create

1:56 have this other book in which they will write their memories of their school year they could for instance start making one page for homework every single day and then at the end they'll have the their book together you can send this to so that they make it with their families however you think it will work best so you insert the picture of the child and then they write and so these are my school family memories and

2:22 so they write for instance my favorite thing about this school year was um my favorite day this year was um one thing I feel excited about next year is my fears about next year are my happiest day my saddest day my biggest love so it's all in this book and they can again create it themselves or with

2:53 help and then at the end it says I will always remember this school year sometimes it seemed easy so sometimes it seemed hard sometimes it felt scary and sometimes it felt exciting but I will always remember how we helped each other and how we worked through it all together I did it you did it we did it and we are certainly all doing it um this is another example of a book that I wanted to share with you this was made

3:23 for me years ago when I left the school where I was working at and children put it together in one classroom each one writing how they would remember me by and the memories they had they had about me um you can also create these certificates again that you can download online either for staff members or for children you insert the picture and this lets them know they will remember this lets them know they've been seen they've

3:52 been valued they belonged and then at the bottom you write something that you saw in them how you saw them grow specific things such as I saw how you would always make sure nobody would play alone in recess I noticed how hard you worked on your schoolwork making sure uh that others were learning too whatever you saw in that child you can write it at the bottom whatever you saw in your

4:24 members of the staff you can write it here and again these are ways in which you honor them celebrate them and we heal the hurt