3 End of the School Year Tips

Do you remember the beginning of the school year? We all felt motivated, energized, organized, and ready to go! By this time of the school year we are feeling tired, papers are everywhere, and we are ready for Summer break. Field trips, grades, field day, awards, and the list goes on and on. Relax and sit back and hopefully these ideas will lessen the stress you are feeling right now. 

Here are three tips to help you get through the end of the year with activities your students are sure to love! 

This is my FAVORITE part of the end of the school year. I am a picture taking fool all year long! I put all of the pictures together into a movie with music. It is usually three or four songs long. In the beginning of the year I take pictures of all my students. I do this at the end as well before I make the movie. I start the movie with all of their little faces. Any field trip we took, activities in our classroom, their families at conference, and any fun memories throughout the year, go into this movie! I end it with their current pictures. I show this on the last day before they leave. It usually has me crying my eyes out and my students are crying as well...but they are happy tears! We have spent all year together and this is one last awesome memory.

We all want to make our students feel special. It has been our goal the entire year. Why stop now? Giving our students something to remember us by and show them how much they mean to us is important. I love giving my students bookmarks with their picture. Put their bookmark in a favorite book you enjoyed reading as a class and give to them as a gift. 

Memory books are a great way to end a school year! Bring in any extra stickers, paper, and pictures you may have laying around. You can make it as simple or complex as you would like. If you are feeling motivated and want to purchase a large classroom scrapbook to keep, they always turn out wonderful. You may just want to print each student a scrapbook to fill out to take a memory with them. Let your students work together in groups as they work on their memory books. Play music in the background and let them enjoy! This just adds another memory they will not forget. 

Here is a list of some other fun ideas:

• Give a gift! Make someone that supported you throughout the year feel special. Give them a bag of popcorn with these cute tags. Did you have a paraprofessional work extra hard for you this year? Did you have a student helper? Parent Support? The list goes on and on of people that may have helped you this year.

 

• Have a theme. Having a theme will get your students excited and help you get through the rest of the year. I love having a camping theme. We set up our tables like tents, have a make shift camp fire, camp fire chairs, guest readers, camp fire stories, s'mores, and camp fire crackling in the background. This is so much fun!

   

• Keep learning hands-on and engaging. There have been so many times you have not been able to do an activity you really wanted to do. Now is the time. Have fun learning!
• Awards are always a must. We all love showing our students how much we appreciated them and their hard work. Set up a red (paper) carpet, place stars down on the floor, print out awards, and enjoy seeing their smiles! 
• Enjoy. I know this part is hard. Summer is almost here. Take all of these moments in and just have fun. You have worked so hard all year long and deserve it! 

I hope all of these tips are helpful! Have a wonderful end of the school year and have a fantastic summer vacation! Continue down for the blog hop directions!

Blog Hop: 4/24/16 UNTIL 4/26/16 ONLY! Here is your secret letter for the blog hop: R  If you are starting here, here is what you need to do: Hop around to all of the blogs in the hop, get tons of awesome end of the year ideas to have the best end-of-the-year EVER, collect the secret letters at each blog, and then put all the letter's together for the secret phrase to enter the giveaway! Next, you will be heading over to Cait's Cool School to get some more awesome tips and get your next letter! Click here to go to her post! You can enter the giveaway for $50 TpT or Target gift card below once you have hopped through all the blogs! 

Good luck and I hope you have an amazing end of the school year!


Click here to enter