It’s that time of year, excitement is brewing in the classroom as the promise of six weeks of no school draws close. Wrapping up with end of year school activities in the final days before the summer holiday gives children the chance to wind down and reflect on the past year. You could even weave in some end of year classroom activities to help you prep for next year. Here we’ve collects 20 tried and tested end of year activities for kids in primary school.
1. School year reflection
Teachers and parents will share at least one concern at the end of the school year: what to do with old school exercise books. When it comes to the final days of school, avoid sending children home with a big bag of paper, or spending hours recycling yourself. Have each child sort through all of their work from the school year and pick out three or four things they want to keep and take home with them. You might want to approve this with parents first in case anyone is expecting a pile of work, but you’ll be in a lot of parents good books!
You could turn this into a group activity by providing the children with a roll of display paper and asking each student to pick something from their work that shows something important they learned that year. The students should then stick their contribution to the paper and the final result is a mural of all the things they’ve learned together over the past school year.
2. A to Z of what we’ve learned
This is a fun memory project if you want productive school end of year activities. Give the children a stack of flashcards each with a letter of the alphabet on it (you can create these using a grid of A4 which has been photocopied and cut up). Ask the children to write and illustrate something they learned or did for each letter of the alphabet. This could be something they learned in lessons, something they did with family or friends, or a significant event they remember from the school year. For example, A: Africa, B: boat trip, C: cross country. You could turn this into a library activity by taking the class to the library and have them look up words in the thesaurus or browse the shelves to find new words to describe things if they are struggling to come up with answers.
Alternatively use props to call on the children to remember something to represent that letter of the alphabet. You could use some bean bags like these Alphabet Bean Bags and ask the children to throw them amongst each other.
3. Swap roles
End of the school year activities kids find exciting and fun, but you can guarantee every teacher is frantic to get things finished before the bell goes. Give yourself some time to wrap up by handing over lessons to the students! Put students into groups and give each group a topic, or let them choose. You might want to pick a subject they’ve learned about that school year to help them reflect on their learnings.
Each group must prepare a lesson to give to the rest of the class. Encourage students to use the whiteboard and take questions. You could even ask them to prepare a small activity, like a quiz, for the rest of the class. Go one further and arrange with another teacher for students to teach the class below them and give them an idea of what to expect from the next school year.
4. Class toast
Another fun way to get children to practise public speaking is to invite them to toast the school year. Bring in some apple juice, lemonade, or another favourite soft drink and some plastic champagne flutes that you can pick up for any party shop. Have the children sit at their tables or sit around the classroom circle with their flute and each take it in turns to stand up and make a speech. This can be anything from praising their classmates for achievements that school year, reminiscing about something fun that happened, or looking to the future and any goals they might have for next year.
5. The End of Year Awards
Your students are up for awards for their behaviour and personalities at the end of the year. Make up several boxes with a letterbox slot in the top. Each one is going to be a voting balot box for a different award. Awards could be ‘best at presentations’, ‘fastest runner in PE’, or ‘best at drawing’, choose subjects that play to the strengths of pupils or skills they’ve been working on.
Hand out ballot slips for each category and have every child vote by putting their slip in the box. Remind the children that voting is private and they shouldn’t ask each other or try to see who they’ve each voted for. Once all the votes are collected you can put on an award ceremony, perhaps even giving out rewards like special certificates.
6. Summer holiday portraits
For end of the school year activities for kids who love to be creative, try setting them the task of drawing a summer holiday portrait. Task each child with drawing themselves on their summer holiday. Don’t forget to include a background and any props they might need like ice cream or the family pet. Once everyone has finished ask the children to swap their drawings around and try to guess who is doing what during the holidays based on the clues in the pictures.
7. Words of praise
As end of the year activities for elementary school go this will have your kids looking forward to seeing classmates next year. Encourage the students to socialise and build confidence with this peer praise activity. Provide the children with a paper cutout head each and ask them to draw and colour in their own portrait. Then have the children put their names on the front and pass the portraits around. Each child has to write a message on the back of the portrait for their peer. Messages should be things they like and admire about their peers or simply messages of good luck for next year. At the end, each child can enjoy reading all of their messages.
These Pre-Cut Card Heads come in a pack of 30 and are perfect for this activity.
8. School year summary
Here’s a quick activity that will give you some time for a breather. Have each child come up with a six-word summary of the school year and write it on the whiteboard using a whiteboard marker. Include some literacy practice in end of the year school activities like this too. If the children have learned about nouns, verbs, and adjectives, this would be a good opportunity to have them practice by asking them to include one of each in their summary.
9. Make an end of year newspaper
Similar to the other end of the year classroom activities here, you could get children reminiscing about the school year and review what they’ve learned by creating a school end of year newspaper.
10. Summer tuff trays
For younger children in primary school, you might want to include some messy play in end of the year activities for school. Get the children thinking about the summer season and all of the changes they are noticing in nature by asking them to go around the playground and collect objects that remind them of summer.
You could point them in the direction of trees and flowers to collect leaves and petals, and maybe even hide some summer clues around the playground for them to find and collect like flashcards with summer pictures on them. Ask all the children to collect their items in their own messy play tuff tray and look through them together at the end.
