Well good evening! or morning, or afternoon depending on when you read this. The end of the school year is nigh and I know you can probably feel the warmth of the sun on your face as you open those doors and walk through them for the last time this year. Although we’ve had nothing but rain and sweatshirt weather the past few days. Now, before you get all wrapped up in those last day happy hour plans, you want to keep up the fun and learning until those kiddos leave your care. Now I can already hear you saying But I don’t want to… Testing may be over and it’s super tempting to find a bunch of videos to watch. Here are some great alternatives:
Students love doing these end of the school year activities.
It’s very cute, fun, educational, and engaging. That’s four adjectives, holy cow! Drop the mic, I’m done. Kidding, but seriously, this is great. Pam’s students created this scenery to go with their bees. She’s going to tell you more. Take it away Pam!
I actually have to give credit to my students who asked if they could create the bee hive and other background scenery to go with their bees. I wish that you could have been a fly on the wall and listened to the great dialogue that went on. I got to witness literacy at its best! My class is over 50% English Language Learners so these types of activities really encourage great literacy opportunities for them!
This idea is super cute and provides a lot of fun for your students. It’s #22 on the list. Here’s a fun twist, have students take turns standing under the balloon as you pop it to catch the surprise for the day. If you’re still in test mode, fill the balloons with quiz questions. Students can answer for a prize or special reward. Also, to add a little fun to a warm day, you can hang the countdown outside and fill a couple balloons with a small(and I mean very small) splash of water. Have students bring a change of clothes just in case they’re uncomfortable getting wet.
The link takes you to the printable. It’s a boy with a missing tooth holding a piece of paper in the middle of the top row. OR, you can do as we teachers do and have kiddos make and decorate their own! Remind students that being a “quality student” as we like to say, or a good citizen is not something that stops when school does. You can even offer it up as a challenge and give a prize to the first 3 students who write about it and show you the following school year.
Here are some fun Minute-To-Win-It challenges for your last day celebration. Encourage critical thinking and teamwork up until the very last minute(haha, no pun intended).
5. Candy Ball
Fun and sweet activity. If you want to add an educational component, include pieces of paper with challenges or questions that students have to complete to win the candy. Young ones may do better playing in groups. Also, you can opt to not use gloves and just have students unwrap.
This is a great opportunity to review material your students had trouble with throughout the year or a fun way to reinforce material before their brains get filled with summer dreams. We have a ton of options for you, with games for addition, subtraction, money, skip counting, spiral math review even ELA concepts like blends and vowels!
We also added an End of the Year Spiral Math review Boom Cards game. Students love watching the bee picture get colored! Try a few cards for free HERE.
This is a cute little freebie for your students on the last day or last week of class. It gets them moving around and gives them an outlet for talking about summer plans. Want to add an ELA component? After they finish the game, have them write about what their friends are doing for the summer. You can adjust the amount of writing according to ability level. You can also just have them draw pictures.
BONUS!!!!!!!
We can’t forget about you and your needs lovely teacher friend. Here are some links just for you:
Let’s face it, we don’t always have a lot of pocket change, even though we wish we could give our students the world(well most of them *winky face*). Here’s an idea I LOVE!
multi-color pens because my students love having all the colors in one pen and notebooks. You could put the sets in these colorful bags. There are 40 in this set and they have one with 50 bags for a few extra dollars if you want to get another teacher to split it with you. I do that with my teacher friends and it’s great because it saves us both money! The students could also decorate their bags with stickers.
If you are fortunate enough to have points from your Scholastic Book Club, then you can always use the points to get books for your students. I put them all on a table and let students pick a book, so they feel like they got a choice.
These items contain affiliate links for which I will receive a small commission if you click through and make a purchase, so thank you for that if you decide to purchase any of the items!
