Hello and welcome back to Charlie’s Lessons – thank-you for reading my blog throughout the school year. I know that it has been a long year for many of us. But it wouldn’t be fair for you or your students to finish it with a whimper, so this blog is all about finishing the year with a bang!
My name is Charlie – I am an English teacher and have been teaching English as a foreign language for over 12 years. I currently work as Director of Studies at a local language school here in Southern Spain. I made this blog series to help other English teachers to help improve their lessons using the latest digital technology for education. But also, to share some of my favourite classroom ideas that I have learned in the course of my teaching career.
Here I’m going to run through 8 of my favourite end of school activities to help you conclude the year on a high note with your class. These are activities that I have used with my students in previous years, but also ones that I’ve borrowed and come highly recommended by my fellow ESL teachers.
Fun Activity 1: Best Memories Or Moments
For this activity, we can ask our students to think back over the previous year and remember their most memorable moments. We can make this activity even more positive by changing the word from memories to best moments. I usually give my students Post-It notes and a pen, as well as a writing prompt such as: “I remember when…”
This is great for practising writing skills as well as past tenses. It can usually be followed by the past simple, but you can also introduce the past continuous. Students could say for example, “I remember when… we were doing a reading activity in class and Pedro farted!” Yes, this did really happen in one of my classes once.
Once you have all of the students with their completed Post-It notes, you can put them on the whiteboard for the end of the year. You can also collect the pieces of paper using a memory bag. Or you could take a photo of the memory and send it to your students at the end of the year to remind them. Alternatively, you can use Google Jamboard if you are working remotely or want to be paperless.
Fun Activity 2: A Letter To Our Future Selves
In our first activity, we were looking at the past. But for our second activity, we are going to look at the future. So, for our next fun activity to end the school year, we can ask our students to write a letter to themselves for the same time the following year.
For weaker students, we can give them a clear structure on how to write their letter in English. We can also restrict them to the simple future tenses, such as ‘like’, ‘will’, ‘going to’ and the present continuous.
We can then address each letter to each student and send it to them for the next time they have to do an end of year activity. This is a great way for them to reflect and think about how far they have come in that year.
Before you say goodbye to your students, why don’t you recommend some self-study tools right here?
Fun Activity 3: The Classroom Oscars
This is similar to a certain fun awards ceremony for the entire classroom. You provide the awards and they provide the speeches. How you wish to allocate the awards depends on your relationship with your students and the relationships between your students. If you are going to award them for skills then you have to be careful about the reaction that this may produce.
So, if I am putting together awards for skills then I usually award the entire class. If I am creating individual awards, then I would normally choose silly categories like the most punctual, sleepiest, happiest, giggliest, and so on. This is so that the little things do not feel too important and we can encourage fun or silly speeches.
If it’s not the end of year and you want some fun activities for the classroom anyway, check out this post here.
Fun Activity 4: Quiz The Book
Activity idea number four is what I call ‘Quiz The Book’, whereby we take a student’s coursebook and set them challenges. A lot of the course books that our students use will include images or text inside that we can incorporate here.
So, using this information, we could ask the students:
- What colour is the man’s T-shirt on page 44?
- Can you use the first words on pages 12, 34 and 67 to create a sentence?
- Can you provide a synonym of [a word] on page 16? The students then search page 16 for that synonym, e.g. the word ‘beautiful’.
This can be set up as a race within the classroom, with the first student to correctly complete their sentence becoming the winner.
Fun Activity 5: One Day At A Time
For this activity, we look at the calendar and how many days are left in the class until the end of the year. We then look at how many students there are and dedicate one day of the remaining school year to each of our students. So, if you have 15 students in your class you can dedicate the final 15 days of the year to each student.
You should find out what each student loves to do the most in your class by speaking to them individually rather than as a group. This is so that they don’t feel pressured by the rest of the classroom and they can fully enjoy their appointed day for this activity.
Fun Activity 6: Fancy Dress
This activity is fun, easy to prepare for and great for all age groups. First, we have a class vote on which theme we would like to celebrate that the end of the year. We can give our students a selection of themes that we prefer and can easily prepare for. We can then put the options to a vote and once everyone agrees, we can ask our students to come to class in that theme of fancy dress for that day.
We can also:
- Create a themed music playlist
- Prepare theme-related quizzes
- Prepare some fun themed games
- Find a TV series or a film that relates to the theme
Even though this is great fun for all ages, you can still expect some complaints from the less enthusiastic students who don’t like dressing up. So, you can expect something like this: “Who actually voted for this theme anyway?” “What’s that? What did Charlie say? He said it was the easiest to prepare for? Okay!”
Fun Activity 7: Summer Holidays
In our 2nd activity, we wrote a letter to our future selves. But activity 7 is more designed for the immediate future. So, when the summer holidays are nearing, I like to give the students an imaginary budget to plan their dream holidays.
This could be absolutely anything that they imagine. But their budget should take into account flights, hotels, restaurants and activities that they may wish to do during their dream holiday. The group that spends the least amount, or has the best ideas wins.
In another one of my blogs, I also use this holiday planning idea in conjunction with the brilliant digital teacher training tool Padlet. So, if you have a virtual class or students with access to digital devices you will find it very useful and can check it out here too.
Fun Activity 8: Paper Aeroplanes
This is a really simple activity that doesn’t require a lot of preparation at all. All you need is some plain paper and instructions for your students on how to build the most common paper aeroplane designs. We can then challenge the students by asking them specific questions such as: “How long does the aeroplane stay in the air?” Or, we can set everyone a challenge to see who can make the best-designed aeroplane that stays in the air for the longest. Or we can ask everyone to attempt to make the most beautiful aeroplane.
Well, there we have my 8 fun end of school year activities and ideas. As the school year winds down, why not try out a couple of these great activities in your next ESL class?
If you have any funny stories or recommendations from when you tried these activities to end the school year in your classroom, feel free to share them with me in the comments below.
If you have some free time over the summer, then get prepared for the new academic year by reading my post on back to school ideas.
If you do use these activities, I hope that you enjoy them as much as my classrooms and I have done. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time!