Preparing for the End of the Year
Summing Up the Last Month of Your Work as a Teacher with Students
Summing up the last month of the school year with a class is very important. Students need to feel a sense of closure of what they learned in light of the year. Teachers, either new or finishing with a class previously taught before, will also reflect and review how well they have taught their objectives and goals. Indeed, it is a learning experience for all.
The end of the year also brings assessments, tests and report cards and from it all, kids are brought to feeling they don't need to make a final effort and finish up the year. Teachers feel the end of the year too, which is why it is important to have a back-up of extra creative materials and ideas on hand especially for those hot days, when the school year starts to slowly wind down.
What can you do?
First, keep the tone of the learning atmosphere as serious as you can and reinforce the rules and procedures and insist on receiving student work.
Next, change the pace a bit. Spend in-class time on learning via different theme lessons and various projects topics. Always however, make sure students know in advance, how they are going to be assessed. the point is to keep the ideas flowing but the tone serious.
For the last week of school, when students have already returned their coursebooks, there are endless ideas for finishing off a class.
Here are a few for starters beginning with the more 'serious' ideas:
1. Ask students to write a letter to the teacher for the next year. Ask them to include important points such as what they would like to learn the following year, what they feel they have learned, and how you as their future teacher can help them. Collect these and hand them to their future teacher or the homeroom teacher to pass on. It is a very interesting and revealing experience.
2. If students don't feel comfortable using the letter type, have them complete various sentence starters:
The best part of the school year was when: ___________________
I really enjoyed the lesson where: _________________________
I'll never forget when: ___________________________________
Invite students to share their ideas with the whole class.
The most important thing is to get them reflecting on their own work and progress.
3. Have brain teasers and memory games. These are really fun and incorporate a variety of thinking skills. Here is one out of many that are on the Internet.
4.Have a scavenger hunt or get the class involved in planning an end of the year party with a game section on the topics they learned. Writing up challenging trivia questions is not such an easy thing to do! Keep the creative channel open or better yet, have the kids suggest various end-of-the-year-activities.
It is equally important to sum up the school year for the new or seasoned teacher with any class.
- What did you find the most challenging teaching this particular class?
- What became gradually easier for you to implement?
- If you could teach this class again, what would you do differently and why?
Only when you have walked out of the classroom, come the end or middle of June, you can really reflect on your own work and progress as a teacher as you look forward to the long summer days forward and a new year of preparation, which begins again.
