End of Year Ideas and Activities for Upper Elementary Classrooms

The end of the school year is hectic and exhausting! 

The end of the school year + distance learning is even more hectic and exhausting! Take a deep breath and get ready to wrap up the year with some amazing and digital activities to end your school year in style, make lesson planning a snap, and keep your students on their toes. #teacherwin

I love wrapping up the year with amazing end of year read alouds, hands-on activities, and projects to spark all the wonderful memories we made throughout the year. Here are some of my favorite projects to wrap up the year.

Keep Them Learning

As the year begins to wind down, keep the routine and normalcy of learning intact. This will help students stay focused and engaged during the final weeks of distance learning. The best activities to keep students engaged and motivated at the end of the school year are projects. I love having students work independently on projects that tie together all of the learning that they did all year long! Some of my favorite independent projects for students with tasks specifically designed for students to work at their own pace independently and include scoring rubrics to make correcting a snap are:

• Math Performance Task PBL
• Biography Research Projects
• Endangered Animal Research Projects
• Ocean Animal Research Projects
• FREE End of Year Writing and Create Your Own Math Game Project

Celebrate Students and Staff

I love to celebrate students and staff members at the end of the school year. I also love to help students celebrate one another and teachers, too. The year that I started teaching fifth grade, which is the last grade level in the school, I started to have my students send Staff Shoutouts. These are always a big hit with my students and my colleagues. During the last week of school, students send at least five shoutouts to former teachers and staff members who they want to thank and recognize as an important part of their lives. When we are in school, students would complete the shoutout form and then secretly tape it to the door of the staff member to surprise them. They are so much fun to send and to receive!  These FREE shoutout forms have gone digital, so you can have your students send them this year, too!

Here are some more ways to celebrate others at the end of the school year:

• Student Recognition Awards (Freebie)
• Staff Shoutouts (Freebie)
• End of Year Thank You Cards
• End of Year Awards and Tags

Bring on the Memories

What is May or June without reminiscing about the school year? I love to offer students new and different ways to celebrate memories, different from traditional memory books they may have made in the past. One way I do this is by having students write ABC end of year poems. It is a great (and challenging) way to get students brainstorming and writing about the amazing year we had together. Another one of my favorite twists on the traditional end of year activities is student expert books. For this project, students create a flipbook of all the different things that they learned throughout the year that made them expert readers, writers, mathematicians, historians, tech specialists, and team players. These are great memory books and keepsakes for students to bring home to their parents to truly show what they know!

• End of The Year ABC Memory Poem
• How to Be a 3rd Grader (with templates for 2nd-5th graders)
• Student Expert Books (with templates for K-5th graders)
• Bio Poems

Don't let the end of the (distance learning) school year be stressful for you, your students, or their parents. Wrap up your year with engaging activities to make the rest of the school year stress-free and extra memorable.

Looking for more ways to keep students engaged this end of school year season? Check out some of my favorite websites to assign meaningful activities to your students.