Ideas for End-of-Year Activities

I know this can be a stressful time between the kids excitement at school almost being over and all the lists of things that need to get done. But I enjoy being able to go off script a little bit. I do daily themes and allow students to apply skills they have learned throughout the year.

We did a Food Truck unit-we read several books about food trucks including 

We used language of the disciplines to talk about vocabulary a chef would use and then also talked about the job of marketing and how they would come up with a name for their truck and a concept. Then I broke the students into groups and they were to come up with what their food truck would be called, what it would look like and a menu. Then they presented their truck to the group.

Make a song/commercial for our school. Again they worked in groups to take a melody of their choice and change the lyrics to be about our school. They really got into this one clapping out the beats and looking for rhymes. After practicing they performed it for the class.

Art Theme-it is very important to me that we incorporate art into our daily plans. We learned about a lot of famous artists this year and the vocabulary that goes along with creating art. For this activity we thought like Mondrian and made a creation using his primary colors/shapes. Then we painted like Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel.  Now rest assured, I did go over with them that the fact he painted the chapel ceiling on his back is actually a myth-but it is really hard to paint a ceiling. So we taped paper up under the tables-each artist had an assistant and using watercolors they attempted to create a masterpiece of their own.

Escape Room-we do a lot of escape rooms throughout the year. This one I made clues to identify which classmate stole the cookie from the cookie jar. "This students has a few friends, actually he has many, he drives his teacher crazy, always talking about Kenny" (this student is obsessed with South Park. They also had word searches, puzzles to put together to see which classmate as well as code breaking and addition to solve for the letters. It was the most fun escape room we did all year!

I will miss this amazing group of boogerbears! :)