My Birthday is on the FIRST Day of School!

Okay, so technically, my birthday is the day BEFORE the first day of school this year, but growing up it was on the first day of school quite often.  It's a good thing I loved school! :)

This year we have Meet The Teacher on August 20, then (my birthday) the 21st is a teacher workday and the official day for the kids is the 22nd.  I love to use my birthday to model how we will celebrate birthdays for the year. ;)  I thought about giving the kids an invitation to a birthday party on the first day of school (no presents allowed, of course!) just to get them REALLY excited about that first day.  I'm not sure though.  What kind of super fun, really cool activities could we do to celebrate?  Any ideas?

I've been thinking about this because yesterday I went to school and put up my birthday display.  I FINALLY found those giant pixie stix at Dollar General and they were only 25 cents each!!

I created my little balloons and stuck them in my birthday display!

For my Hollywood theme I used pencils with stars taped to the tops and red and gold bags.  I found these short-ish gift bags and tissue that coordinates with my theme at Target!

What else do you do for students' birthdays?  I'm going to switch up the traditional "Happy Birthday" song (because my kiddos DROVE me CRAZY with all the add-ons at the end last year....at first they were cute, but then as the year went on it lasted about 10 minutes.  When the "EAT MORE CHICKEN" line was added last year, I knew I needed a change!)  Instead, we're going to try this Happy Birthday Cheer that I found on Pinterest (of course, I needed to cutesy it up...click to download your copy).

I also have my students work on a page to create a "Happy Birthday" book for the birthday student for morning work instead of the traditional assignment that morning.  Since the birthday kid doesn't need to create a page, he/she gets to design the cover of the book!

The birthday kid also gets to pull a birthday coupon from a birthday bag for some type of special treat for the day.

At the end of the day (while waiting on car numbers, etc), the birthday kid gets to play a "Birthday Bonanza Game" with a friend of his/her choice.  It's really just a sneaky way to get in some addition and subtraction practice (there are one, two, and three digit card sets for different times of the year), but they think it's FUN!

I want to know -  what do you do to celebrate student birthdays?  And, what do you think I should do about the first day of school?  Celebrate or not?  I've always wanted to have a party/celebration for the FIRST day of school (shouldn't we have kids celebrate the start of school rather than the end of school?), but I definitely don't want parents to send in gifts.  Help me out here....what do you think?

Also, swim by to visit Courtney at Swimming into Second today and you could win the Non-Fiction Text Features Sign set from Teacher's Clubhouse!  Click below.