The end of another school year is something to celebrate! Help your students reflect on the highlights of the past school year with three meaningful activities featured in our May blog post. These activities are simple, memorable, and flexible. Whether you use these end-of-the-year activities in the classroom or at home, your students will enjoy reflecting on the milestones they reached this year. Read on to find out more.
If there is anything we can say about this school year, it has certainly brought some challenges none of us expected! Many communities affected by the COVID-19 virus have had to close schools and transition to at-home learning. One thing is for sure—the 2019-20 school year taught us to be patient and flexible. Now it's time to help your students look back and remember all the good times and all the amazing things they accomplished this year. Following are a few activities that allow them to do just that.
Many teachers do this activity at the beginning of the school year, but it is also a great idea for the end of the school year too! Have your students write you a friendly letter to express anything they want to share in the last days of school. You could make this activity very open-ended and ask students to write what they are thinking and feeling about the end of the school year and give them a chance to express anything important they want you to know. You could also provide more structure to this activity by asking your students to include several topics in their letters. Here are some ideas:
As you can see, there are endless possibilities for topics your students can choose to include in their letters to the teacher. Many teachers are surprised and touched to learn about what impacted their students most over the past school year. This activity is a great way to tie together all the memories you made as a class this year.
Here is another awesome activity for putting all the memories from the past school year in one place. Have students create an end-of-the-year memory book as a keepsake. For this art project, students will use a variety of supplies, like construction paper, computer paper, markers, crayons, glue sticks, and scissors to create a one-of-a-kind memory book of their school year.
In our example, we picked out a few fun topics to include in student memory books. Students can include pages dedicated to favorite subjects, favorite books, and favorite memories, plus a special autobiographical page and a page for classmate "autographs."
Feel free to swap out some of these page ideas with your own or add more. You will be amazed at the creative projects your students come up with!
The end of the school year is a wonderful time to celebrate your students' accomplishments with student award certificates. You may want to give out awards for achievement in specific subjects, like reading and writing, math, science, social studies, and spelling. You may also consider giving character awards to celebrate your students' admirable character traits, like kindness, responsibility, happy helper, and more. You could have a special "Awards Day" the last week of school. You could even start an "award chain" in which you present the first student award, and then each student who is called up to receive his or her award gets to present the next student's award to them by reading a cue card. It's extra special to see students building up one another's self-esteem and participating in an act of generosity. Check out the Printable Student Awards Collection on Super Teacher Worksheets for inspiration!
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The last few weeks of school can be a chaotic time for teachers who want to end the year on a high note. These celebratory activities are the perfect solution for teachers who may not have a lot of time to devote to complicated projects but still want to find ways to commemorate a great year. Remember to tag @superteacherworksheets on social media if you and your students do any of these activities!
Be sure to visit the Super Teacher Worksheets End of the Year Page for more fun activities and printable resources to make the last days of school memorable!
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