Behind the Glass: End of Year Gifts, Slideshows, and Memory Books

I'm linking up with my sweet friend Tara for the kick off of the weekly Monday Made Its. It's my favorite time of the year because this linky is just my style. I'll definitely be getting my craft on this summer. Hopefully, you will join in on all of the fun. Best part???  ...it doesn't even have to be school related. I hope to have some recipes, photography tips and some home made its to share this summer. I'm so ready for summer... it's almost here. I have 5 more days of school so I'm in hustle mode right now to finish all the little details for our Royal Celebration. On Monday, we will be having our Royal Celebration to showcase our fairy tale plays we've been working extra hard on. I'll also be giving out royal awards, our ABC's of First Grade memory books and end of the year gifts.  This will also be our time to watch the end of the year slide show that turned out oh so cute.  I posted a sample slideshow with some snippets of imovie below because I'm in LOVE! It was super easy. I used the theme of ABC's of First Grade.

Monday Made It - Groovebook- Ok, teachers...this is my new FAVORITE find. It's called Groove Book. It will send you a photo book EACH MONTH with 100 of your latest photos for $2.99 and that includes shipping. Sound too good to be true???? I promise it's not! I just signed up and uploaded my first 100 photos last month. If you take lots of phone pics this is THE. BEST. THING. EVER!! Even the app is free. The best part is you can do duplicates of pictures. I could see using this in the classroom for sure. How great for parent volunteer gifts? When I need pictures at the beginning of the school year I'll upload to my phone so I can make a GrooveBook. I also like how the book tells you the time you took the photo. You can easily rip out pictures because the book is perforated. The possibilities are endless. For less than $3 you can't go wrong in my opinion. 

Monday Made It -The ABC's of First Grade- This would have been a really simple project if I would have started earlier and added pics each month or so. Instead, I created this custom book in one sitting. It took me about 5 hours to find all my pictures and insert them in Shutterfly. I used the custom path and found backgrounds I liked. Next year it will so much easier as I'll just switch out the pictures. I ended up spending $25 dollars on this precious book. The books were $40 but shutterfly always has awesome coupons. I sent the link out to my parents and they were able to get 50% and free shipping. If you want to learn more about this project check out Kindercraze. She has a little tutorial.

Next Monday Made it came from the fabulous Katie at Little Warriors

Of course I love anything that involves photographs. I know the parents will love this! 

For this project you simply take a picture of your students against a wall. Insert the picture in powerpoint and add some text boxes.

I used the fonts listed below. 

I then saved as a jpeg and printed them 5x7 to Wal-Mart. I found the frames for $1.00 at the Dollar Store. My pictures turned out fine but powerpoint to jpeg is not the best quality. Next year I'll try to increase the dpi. I found some tutorials here.

Here is a portion of our End of the Year Slideshow. I took out my powerpoint slides that had students names and shortened the video just so you could get an idea of how you can insert powerpoint slides into imovie or moviemaker.  I like having the theme of ABC's of First Grade or whatever grade because it helps me organize my pictures. 

On Friday we had our dress rehearsal for our fairy tales  The students are so excited to perform the plays for their families on Monday. We will be having cupcakes and refreshments after the performance. Here are the tables partly decorated for the Royal Celebration.