UPDATE 5/17/23: For more “Surprise Ending Ideas,” check out my End of the Year Wakelet here.
I always laugh when people say that we should end school earlier in the year because the last few weeks are a waste. What do they think would happen if school stopped in April? Somehow I doubt the teachers or students would be any less eager for the last day. The way I see it, the only way to fix this problem is to never have a last day – or to never tell anyone when it is.
“Ok, boys and girls. Bus riders are dismissed and so are car-riders and walkers. Oh, and by the way, there’s no school for the next 2 1/2 months.”
Yep. That would go over well.
A surprise end-date probably won’t get the approval of any school board on this planet, so I recommend a surprise ending, instead.
What do I mean? I mean, don’t resort to the predictable, let’s-show-movies-and-wear-pajamas-and-read-all-day plans that are the fallback for so many teachers this time of year. This is your time to M. Night Shyamalan your way into teaching fame! (But not in a spooky “Guess what, you’re dead, too,” way – more in a “School is way more than filling in bubbles on a piece of paper” way.)
How can you surprise them? Here are some activities that could make the highlight reels of your students’ year.
- Play a Breakout Edu game.
- Do a Goosechase scavenger hunt.
- Get some feedback from your students in creative ways.
- Use Hexagonal Learning to reflect on the school year. (Thanks to the GT teacher who gave me this idea!)
- Try some Word Cloud App Smashing.
- Make a Rube Goldberg Machine.
- Do a Mini Cardboard Box Challenge – what game can they make out of a shoe-box?
- Don’t you think it’s time to conduct the Ultimate Paper Airplane Competition?
- Do some Balloon-Popping math.
- Have a video game design contest.
- Give your students a Bottle of Dreams!
What suggestions do you have to make these last days memorable for your students? Put them in the comments below!
(image from Tetsumo on Flickr)
Thank you for these. I completely agree with you. I even had a parent last month say-“well, the school year is already over-I don’t count the month of May because I know you’ll just show movies for the last month”. Um, have you met me?! 🙂 We do a lot of projects that are a culmination of skills we have learned throughout the year. We do one on gratitude and one on a picture we take at school of something that inspires us. I also do the fun units at the end-dinosaurs and the ocean.
You are the last person I would ever suspect of being a let’s-show-movies-and-wear-pajamas-and-read-all-day kind of teacher! 😉