25+ Ideas for Year End Fun Activities

Are those ants in your pants or are you just a teacher nearing the final days of the school year? Seriously, as the countdown to year end happens, both teachers and students start to get a little lackadaisical. But year end fun activities can save the day(s).

To keep students engaged, it’s important to keep year end fun activities high-interest and productive. Continue to teach the standards, but make sure to use fun and interactive activities to do so. In this way, you can end the year on a positive note that ushers out the year rather than just fizzling out.

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25+ Ideas for Year End Fun Activities

School Reflection Activities

1. Reflect on the whole school year – Give students time and space to consider their growth this year. They can reflect on how they have grown in various areas of their lives such as reading ability, physicality, education, and more. This end of year reflection activities pack with writing rubrics is a fun (and no-prep) option. 
2. Reflect on growth in a specific subject area – Students can review their work throughout the course to create a mini-portfolio and write a reflection about their progress. Providing a few key areas would be helpful for students; these could include written expression, creativity, critical thinking, or a series of specific standards. If you did a diagnostic writing sample, you could share the same prompt and have students compare their early work with this new work.
3. Reflect on accomplishments – Ask students to create their own highlight reel. What were the highlights of the year in their academic journey? How could they best showcase theirs? Is it strictly written or could it combine writing and visuals, perhaps a media component or a presentation? 
4. Musical reflection – Get students to create a playlist of songs that reflect their year. This can be both personal and academic. Make sure students add a rationale for each of their choices. This one does double duty because it can provide a soundtrack for those final days too!

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Summer Activities

1. Visualize a Perfect Summer – Focusing on what’s next is another one of those year end fun activities that can engage students and provide a positive exit to the school year. You could have students create a bucket list of sorts where students, through words and images. It can even describe their ultimate summer plans.
2. Create a Summer Social Media Page – Have students design their own FYP–for you page–with things they’d like to try or explore this summer that might be a little outside their usual routine.
3. Craft a Summer Movie based on the student’s life – Students can plan out their ideal summer as a film either in storyboards, specific scenes, or a movie poster! Students write about their summer goals, their perfect summer, and more! This End of the Year Activities BUNDLE is a FUN way to engage your middle and high school students as they close out the year, continue learning at home, or participate in summer school activities! 

Setting Goals

1. Set goals for the summer – Keep the momentum going from goals students set during the school year with some goals for the summer. These can be academic in nature, especially if students are in summer school, but incorporating other personal options is great too. Check out this summer goals and writing activities pack to get your students more goal-oriented for summer. 
2. Set goals for next year – While students (and teachers) might not be in the mindset of thinking about the next school year, ending the year with some future goal-setting is ideal. Students’ skills are clear at the moment so spending a bit of time while this knowledge is fresh is a great way to establish some future goals.  For more about back-to-school goal setting check out this post. And get your own bundle of back-to-school goal setting lessons and activities.
3. Set goals for the next 5 years – Give students a chance to dream a little about the future. Not only can they brainstorm what they’d like to do in the next 5 years (or even 10, 15, 25 years!) but think about the plans to achieve those goals. Share author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s quotation “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” This is a great jump-off point for setting those long(er) term goals while incorporating year end fun activities!

Writing Poems – just have fun but with writing

1. Where I Live Poem – This form of poem encourages students to write about where they live with specific, detailed language! Students can consider school as a place they ‘live’ for the purpose of the poem in order to share their school experiences. Use this resource so students can easily interact with the poem template, assess their own writing, and create a visual based on their own poetry!
2. How To Poem – Use Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” as inspiration for poems about a process and the specific steps in that process. Students could record the steps to make paper planes or cook a recipe, or something else entirely. If it’s paper planes, once written have students swap poems and follow the directions provided by their classmates. Then head outside to enjoy some nicer weather and test out the viability of those planes (and the accuracy of the instructions in their how-to poems!). Get a full lesson plan complete with scaffolded instructions and templates here to make this one of the year end fun activities you do in your classroom.
3. Who I Really Am Poem – This is an option for students to share how they have grown or changed over the year. Make it an added challenge by focusing on palindrome or reverse poems. These are poems that have one message when read from top to bottom, and a different message when read from bottom to top. Poetry as a part of your year end fun activities can be challenging and engaging!

Want to read more about teaching 3 engaging poems by Walt Whitman you can include in year end fun activities? Click below!

Short Stories – you just really want to teach as Year End FUN Activities

1. “Click Clack the Rattle Bag” – Neil Gaiman’s short story is high interest and worth adding to the rotation at the end of the year. The story will hook students and to ensure they understand the content use these reading comprehension activities that are Common Core-aligned.
2. “The Veldt” – Ray Bradbury’s story of technology gone wrong is a study in suspense that can’t be missed. Use these quiz activities and even consider watching the short film version of the story (24 mins) as a companion piece. It’s a great way to spend some time honing those comparative writing (and thinking) skills. 
3. “The Cactus” – This short story focuses on a couple’s misunderstanding so it’s part suspense, part drama, and part romance. Download this FREEBIE to help students understand the story and decide what the title means in relation to the characters.  
4. “Lamb to the Slaughter” – Is there a more classic story with a twist than this one by Roald Dahl? This is another story where students can watch an adaptation with this Hitchcock tv episode inspired by the story and compare it to the written version. But start out their analysis with this questions activity bundle so they understand the twist. 
5. “A Vendetta” – If your students are fans of “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant, then this story is right up their alley. And even if they haven’t read “The Necklace,” this story is still enticing with its focus on getting revenge. The idea that revenge is a dish best-served cold is key to this story! Get students to understand the details of the story with this comprehension activities pack as a part of your year end fun activities.

Film Analysis – Short or Long Clips

1. Teaching Film Techniques – Students love movies but what do they know of the technical aspects? Letting them behind the curtain of filmmaking can inspire the next Spielberg in your classroom. Check out this Film Techniques Analysis pack to establish how the techniques contribute to the purpose of ANY film!
2. Teaching Film/Poetry Analysis – Pairing texts is one of my favorite things to do and is a great addition to the year end fun activities you do in your classroom. And poetry and film make an ideal match. Check out this lesson that pairs the song Bells from the film Hairspray with Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Bells.” Using Common Core standards, this lesson seeks to compare and contrast two different media in a fun way.
3. Teaching Film Like Literature – Students often think that film and literature are two very distinct categories; however, they’re more alike than first appear. Introduce this idea to students with this FREE activity about their 10 favorite (or not-so-favorite) films. This introduces film analysis in a fun way that is sure to engage students as the school year comes to a close with year end fun activities that include movies!

Let’s talk about it through Year End Fun Activities

1. Discussion Circles – Give students a chance to ask great questions and to follow their interests. Make it less about the topic and more about the activity tied to it – asking questions, and leading and participating in the discussion. By the end of the year, most students just want to talk with each other. So let them by including chats in your year end fun activities! As long as they have a purpose and are tied to the standards in some way, you are good to go. Plus, admin loves them!
2. Lead the Class – If you’re so inclined have students teach a mini-lesson. This can be specific to English class or something to showcase their knowledge and/or talents. Have them write it out first as an expository paragraph and then lead the class or a small group. Creating groups of 4-5 students means more presentations can happen in a single class and can help students feel more comfortable sharing their year end fun activities. 

Start (But Don’t Finish) a Research Idea For Year End Fun Activities

1. Brainstorm ANY idea a student is interested in/curious about – Consider this a mini-Genius Hour project. Students can brainstorm a topic of interest with step-by-step instructions in this resource. It breaks down how to come up with ideas for writing through a teacher presentation, a note-taking guide, a lesson ideas page, and a student worksheet for help in preparing for expository research writing!
2. Narrowing Down Topics – Once students have brainstormed a variety of topics they can learn how to narrow their choices with best practices featured in this resource. With a full teacher guide and interactive student presentation, it’s an easy choice when selecting year end fun activities! 
3. Breaking Topics into Sub-topics – Then get students to take the next step in their research with this set of activities to establish sub-topics. This is a great idea if you want to have students work in small groups for a project too. While time is limited and students might not be able to complete a full research project on their own, introducing some collaboration could help move this project toward completion in the final weeks of school. 
4. What to Research About My Topic? – This final research option is all about the Goldilocks approach to research: what is too broad, too specific, or JUST RIGHT when preparing to research a topic! Available in both digital and printable formats this set of writing activities can make teachers’ lives easier when time is waning in the school year. 
5. Present research in a creative way – Incorporating year end fun activities is a chance to provide a bit more choice in class at this tough time of year. With the research students have compiled in any of the previous activities, they could create posters, speeches, poems, discussions, advertisements, or whatever else seems feasible in the time that’s left in the year.

These year end fun activities offer options that will continue to develop student knowledge, understanding, and skills but are loaded with creativity and fun! As a result, they will ensure students–and teachers–end the year positively. And for students, ending the school year positively is vital to their continued growth as human beings.

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