End of the Year Fun!

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The end of the school year can be a grueling time when you fight your students every step of the way, or it can be a fun time when you create special memories together. The traditional advice is to keep following your regular routines, but I always found myself to be fighting a losing battle when I did that. My only hope was to engage them in activities that were a little different from the norm and make the last few days enjoyable for us all.

Last year on Teaching Resources, I outlined a dozen ways to keep kids active and engaged at the end of the year. Here they are in no particular order:  

• Learning Centers
• Cooperative Learning
• Classroom Book Clubs
• Welcome and Advice Letters
• Class Scrapbooks
• Class Newsletters
• Fun Friday
• Scrabble Tournaments
• Outside Learning
• Team Challenges
• Ed Tech and Online Learning Games
• Multimedia Projects

For more details about how to implement these strategies, read the full article, "Easy and Fun Activities to Wrap Up the School Year."

End of the Year Classroom Management Strategy
It goes without saying that if you plan to have your students do special activities at the end of the year, you need a great classroom management system in place. It's important to have a back-up plan, too. I highly recommend the Erase-a-Letter Strategy. In a nutshell, you write the word STOP on the board and cross off a letter each time you have to warn the class about their behavior. When they run out of letters, you stop the activity and switch to a back-up plan. You can read a full description of the Erase-a-Letter Strategy on Teaching Resources.

If you aren't out of school yet, I hope you find something here to make your last days less grueling and more fun. For those of you lucky enough to be out already, just pin this blog post to your End of the Year board on Pinterest to save it for next year!