The end of the school is stressful, exciting, and bittersweet. These are our top five end-of-the-year ideas for gifts, lessons, classroom management, and more!
End Of The Year Ideas: Keep It Normal
This is so important, but it’s also so hard! And I know it won’t be very popular, but after 19 years, this is my number one end-of-the-year tip: As much as possible, keep things routine for as long as possible. Keep the schedule, the routines, and expectations. Kids thrive on structure and routine, so don’t take that away. The end of the year can be stressful and scary for our students, so keeping our classroom as routine as possible helps them deal with their emotions. Now, we know this isn’t always in our control…but think about the things you can control. In our class, we keep learning, doing centers, and doing small groups until the last day or so of school. I don’t start tearing my room down until the last day or so. Trust me. It helps.
End Of The Year Ideas: Class Photo
Another of our end-of-the-year ideas is to create a class picture to remind you of your year together! I love this simple and fun template from Mrs. Adams Kinder. After making them, I print the pictures at Walgreens and give each kid a copy!
The directions can be found at this link: https://linktr.ee/MrsAdamsKinder
End Of The School Year: Student Silhouettes
Make student silhouettes! They’re such a great keepsake. I still have mine from kindergarten. Of course, that one required me to sit perfectly still for minutes, and then my teacher had to meticulously hand-cut the silhouette. Thank goodness for technology. This video shows you how you can simply make end-of-the-year gifts with student silhouettes using Canva.
End Of The Year Ideas For Kindergarten: Create A Scrapbook
During the last week or so of school, we read the book A Letter From Your Teacher On The Last Day Of School. We spend time sharing our favorite memories from the year. As we share our memories, we create graphic organizers!
Students then create a scrapbook of our year together!
Here are the topics included in our scrapbook: Our classroom, Our Favorite Activities, Our Favorite Lunch, Our Favorite Recess Activities, Our Favorite Centers, Our favorite Dress up Day, Our Favorite Part Of The Day, Our Favorite Snack, Our Favorite Memory, Our Favorite Books, Our Favorite Thing We Learned, Our Teacher, Our Favorite Science Experiment.
End Of The Year Ideas: HAVE FUN
Keeping kids engaged at the end of the year is HARD, like peeling kids off the ceiling. One of our end-of-the-year ideas is to make learning fun. Use this time to keep learning but use topics/themes/units that kids are excited about. In May, we learned about space, dinosaurs, and animals, and we’ve even gone camping in our classroom! Consider what your kids are into and bring that into the classroom to keep that engagement up! You can also do fun theme days: glow day, camping day, etc. Definitely check out our Backwards Bootcamp for lots of ideas and activities you can use immediately for engagement and fun!
For example, we learn about dinosaurs by going on a fossil hunt by digging chocolate chips out of cookies! And we learn about dinosaurs!
Turn your classroom into a campground! Put up a tent, play a campfire video, and turn the bathroom into an outhouse!
For more ideas and resources, check out these blog posts:
