We’ve all seen the meme of the bear emerging from his burrow after seven months of hibernation.
For me, that’s what the end of the school year feels like.
Since August, you’ve been nose-to-the-ground working. Routines protect classrooms and help students feel safe, but they can also create a blur.
As the smoke of state testing clear, I feel like the hibernating bear: I’ve come out into the sun, started to look around, and wonder how we got here.
At the same time, I want to look back on the year and reflect on student growth. Since I’m still in bear-mode, I want to keep our celebrations simple, so these are the 10 I have planned for the end of the school year.
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End of the School Year Celebrations
For the first time in a few years, I have seniors. The end of the school year with seniors is special but stressful. Here are a few suggestions for seniors getting ready to graduate:
- Send them off with a poem! These are my 8 favorite recommendations for graduates and their families.
- Check in with your community for expectations and standards for attending graduation parties and similar events.
- Challenge seniors to end with gratitude. Graduation often overlaps with or closely follows Teacher Appreciation Week, so this is the perfect time to greet students with the thank-you challenge.
- Ask students if you can sign their yearbooks! Students feel so special if you ask them rather than their having to ask you.
End of the School Year Writing
One of my favorite parts of teaching is seeing students’ writing growth. It’s hard to take a high school ELA class and not make writing growth. Here are some ways to spotlight that growth at the end of the school year:
- When students complete a back-to-school bucket list, I try to save them. Then, I get those back out at the end of the school year so students can see all their successes. If I didn’t have students complete a bucket list during our back-to-school stations, students can create a summer vacation bucket list!
- Similarly, around New Year’s, I often ask students to write letters to themselves. Again, I try to save these and return them to students at the end of the year. A fun variation on this activity is to have your current students write a letter to next year’s students and to encourage them to provide advice and inspiration for the course ahead.
- For a more structured writing prompt, I enjoy these end of the school year journal prompts. There’s a variety of prompts to choose from, so you can use these for bell work several days during the last month of the school year. Here are my favorite strategies for these prompts!
- Alternatively, these summertime visual writing prompts are excellent bell ringers for the end of the school year!
End of the School Year Chores
No school year is complete without some chores. Like most chores, these are not necessarily my favorite, but each serves an essential purpose.
- If you teach a course with state testing, this probably isn’t necessary. However, for my courses without standardized testing, I appreciate an end of the school year diagnostic. While writing growth is sometimes so obvious I don’t necessarily need a writing diagnostic, reading growth can be much more subtle. For this reason, I try to revisit a reading diagnostic to capture standard-by-standard reading growth.
- At the end of the school year, I always appreciate a good classroom reset and declutter. In particular, I take a hard look at my Google Drive, classroom library, and desk drawers to see what needs tidying and purging.
