A MiddleWeb Blog
By Megan Kelly
Teacher fatigue at the end of the school year is real and well earned. Still you and your students have spent a significant amount of time together, and it merits celebration.
One of my favorite sayings is that if you stay ready, then you don’t have to get ready. This applies to the end of the year. A little work in advance will pay off as those long final days draw to an end.
I teach on a team with nine advisors and 110 students, and we want to make sure all of the students feel seen and special. Throughout the year, we take lots of photos of our students and keep them organized on Google Drive. I’ll use Canva to make collages of their photos for our hallway bulletin board, checking off a list of names to make sure that everyone is represented.
A Lively End-of-Year Video
Once those collages are put together, it’s really easy to move some photos around, remove backgrounds, add some new images and animations, and set it all to music as an “End of Year Video.” I like to pick songs that are likely to get them singing along, whether it’s a current hit or a perennial school bus favorite like “I Want It That Way.”
Students love this video and will often cheer when they see their or their friends’ photos. Putting lots of photos on a slide at the same time guarantees a raucous presentation. Once you get in the rhythm of documenting and organizing photos, this end of year activity is not a heavy lift.
A Surprise Game, Based on a Secret Survey
While we have the students gathered together for a final video, we like to surprise them with a Kahoot game based on a secret survey we did with their parents. In April I send a Google Form to parents, asking them a variety of questions about their children and requesting that they keep it a surprise for the end of the year. I like to start early because it sometimes takes a few emails to get most family responses.
The questions that I ask are geared to our international school community, but here are a few worth sharing that might spark ideas of your own:
- What is your child’s favorite food?
- How many times has your child moved? (Moving house/apartments counts!)
- What was your child’s favorite book when they were little?
- If your child was an animal, what animal would they be?
- How many languages does your child speak/understand?
- What is your child’s hobby?
- What was your child’s first word?
I also give parents an option of sharing a baby photo, which they love to do. Every year, there are a few parents who don’t respond. That student’s advisor is tasked with finding out their favorite color or hobby in a casual way, so that everyone is represented.
Once I have the results, it’s easy to use the spreadsheet to group students and create questions. On Kahoot you can insert slides that aren’t part of the quiz, so I’ll make a page with five or six baby photos on it. This is always met with screams, but because so many babies are on the screen at once, there is community in the laughter.
Pick Your Activity
There are often days during the final week when you have the students but classes are done and there are some hours to fill! We often organize this as an activity day, where teachers offer an activity of their choice and students sign up in advance for what they would like to do.
I teach at a large school, so we are able to offer many different activities for students. They’ll choose their top 5 choices on a Google Form a week in advance, which gives us some flexibility on where we place them. We keep the same block schedule that we have for the day, but instead of their classes, the students will go to the three activities they are assigned.
While it takes some organization in advance, teachers get to offer an activity of interest to them, and they do it three times. This day is very popular with students, who often wish that school was like this more often.
Share Your Own End-of-School Ideas!
I’ve described three activities that help us end our year in a fun and playful way. I’m always looking for more ideas on how to celebrate as a community, so please share in the comments if you can make our final days of the school year better.
Feature image: Unsplash+
