End of the year anticipation

I've eagerly been keeping track of the number of school days left along with the students! It's time for summer! As the time draws closer, their attention span is getting shorter, they are getting chattier, and their teacher is getting less patient by the day. The number of items that I need to confiscate during class also seems to be growing:

However, as I sit down and reflect on the past year and my students, it's beginning to hit me that I only have 4 days left with them! And only one of those is a normal day in the classroom. On the last day of school, I give Certificates of Appreciation for something unique that I appreciate about each student from the school year. I've kept my lists from the last two years, and so I thought that it would be fairly easy this year to just assign those to my current students. However, as I sat down to work on it today, I realized that it's not that simple, because each student is special, and each class is unlike any class that came before them. So it was time to hit the thesaurus again. :) It will be hard to say good-bye on Friday, and I will miss each one dearly... from the Exciting Entertainer to the Social Studies Specialist to the Hardworking Hero to the Considerate Encourager... But I am so thankful for the time I've been able to spend with them and get to know them. It's exciting to think about how God will use each one of them as they grow!