Engaging End of Year Activities

Happy June! While many of us (me! Hallelujah.) are already enjoying summer vacation, many other teachers still have a few weeks left with their students. *Moment of silence for these teachers* If you’re one of these teachers, then you are probably searching for some engaging end of year activities.

It can be hard to keep students interested at the end of the year, especially if testing is already over. And while it would be awesome to just show a movie everyday until the end of the school year, unfortunately most schools frown upon that…

If you’re struggling to find end of the year activities for your class, here are three ideas I’ve used in the past that you may find helpful.

3 End of Year Activities for Students

1. Have your students teach the class.

One of my favorite end of year activities is to have your students teach the class one day. I ran out of time this year, but I did this last year and LOVED it. My students loved it, too. They say there’s no better way to learn than to teach! I took a day on the last week of school, partnered my students up, and gave them around 45 minutes to an hour of prep time to prepare a math lesson to teach the class. They could choose the topic, and I allowed (mostly) full access to any resources I had in my classroom for them to use.

We went over the basics of a good lesson – there’s a teaching time, an activity, and an assessment. I encouraged my students to be creative and think outside the box.

What they came up with was AMAZING! I loved watching them be little teachers. I had students put on puppet shows, create games, make up their own tests…it was awesome! They had fun and I didn’t have to do a thing. Easy day for me, fun learning experience for them.

End of year activities - student classroom takeover

Have your students teach the class as an end of the year activity

End of year activities - students teach the class

If you’re interested in trying out this activity, check out this free student lesson plan template (print & digital versions included) to help your students plan the perfect lesson.

2. Prepare them for next year.

This isn’t quite as fun and takes a little more preparation, but two years ago when I taught third grade, I had about 3 weeks between state testing and the end of school. So I started teaching 4th grade math.

Our curriculum had some bonus material in the back that introduced 4th grade topics so I just used that. You can always pull some great lesson plans from Teachers Pay Teachers or talk to the teachers in the next grade level and see if they have anything you can use.

Preparing your students for next year is great and super helpful to the next teachers, but sometimes our students just aren’t quite ready for that. If that’s the case, idea #3 might be more your style.

3. Reinforce and review topics from this year.

If you don’t feel your students are quite ready to start the next grade level yet, or there are some areas you want to reinforce, spend some time reviewing during the last couple weeks of school.

Now, the word “review” can get a lot of eye rolls because, well, it sounds boring. But you know I’m a firm believer that review is one of the most fun parts of learning! Students have already learned the material the first time, so you have a little more freedom to get creative.

Play some fun, but relevant, review games or do a room transformation! You can find lots of fun review activities on Pinterest or TpT. If you’re specifically looking for end of year activities for 2nd grade math, I have a bundle of interactive reviews that would make great room transformations!

Or not, you can do whatever you want with them. But either way, they are great end of year class activities to review concepts learned throughout the year. And of course, super engaging and fun!

The end of the year can be a struggle for everyone as students, teachers, and even parents start to get burned out from the year. Because of this, it’s important that we keep it interesting and do our best to engage those kiddos while still doing our jobs and you know, teaching. Hopefully these end of year activities have given you some ideas of how you can finish out the year strong and go out with a BANG!