4 Great Ways to End the School Year!

How do you like to end the school year in your upper elementary or middle school class?  I aim for activities that engage my students' imaginations and interests, while also reviewing academic content from the year we've spent together. 

Here are a few ideas for you to consider as that last day of school finally approaches!

Board Games

Two or three weeks before school ends, I begin a board game unit.  It takes about 11 days in all, with the end products being student-created games that review different academic subject areas.  This is one of the most successful activities I do, and students look forward to it all year!  

We start by playing and examining different board games we have in our classroom or from home, looking at:

• how instructions are formatted
• types of different game boards
• types of playing pieces (ie. dice, cards, etc.)

Students then get into groups, with each group choosing a different academic subject. Then day by day, with structured support, they create a board game that can be played by their peers and by next year's students.  

My students have so much fun with this unit that I'm not sure they realize that they are actually reviewing the full school year.  If you would like to check out the board game I created for my TPT store, click here!

Debates

Another great activity that grabs students' attention are class debates.  To help them meet with success, I:

• show online videos of student debates.
• carefully teach the formal structure of a debate.
• put students in teams of 3, with each team debating against one other team.
• demonstrate how to research and prepare for a debate.
• involve students not directly in a particular debate to become "shareholders" in the debate topic, allowing them to assess each debate team using specific criteria

If you would like a free debate schedule/organizer, click here!  I also have a full class debate unit available in my TPT store.

Book Swaps

At the end of every school year my classroom library always requires some "weeding" and reorganizing. Long ago I realized that  I could involve my students in this task, and from that initial thought I developed my annual "book swap" event.

My process for this book swap is:

1. Review characteristics of each literary genre (ie. adventure, historical fiction, etc.) and each type of non-fiction texts. As our class library was set up by students back in September by genre, they are brought back full-circle!  
2. I assign pairs or groups of students to each genre, and have them go through that genre's book bins to ensure that each book belongs there.  Students also look for books that we have more than two copies of, or that are no longer in prime shape, and set those aside for our book swap.
3. All extra copies and outdated books are put in a box.
4. I send a letter home to parents explaining that we will be having a book swap day coming up. I invite students to bring in a book or two that they no longer need or want with their parents' permission.  For each book they bring in, I give them a "book swap ticket".
5. 
   The day before our book swap day, students sort ALL the available books (books students previously weeded from our class collection + books they brought in), and create labels for each genre.
6. Book Swap Day:  students exchange their "book swap tickets" for new-to-them books.  Students who were unable to bring in books from home also have an opportunity to select books from the extras from the classroom.  

Now all students have some new reading material for the summer!

Get your FREE Book Swap Planner here!

Clear Out the Classroom Day!

In addition to extra books, which I deal with through our annual book swap, I usually find myself with tons of items that can easily be given to students.  (NOTE:  I make sure I have checked with my principal before doing this activity.)  Those items can include:

• extra freebies included in Scholastic Book orders throughout the year.
  
• posters I will no longer need.
• extra craft supplies that will not be needed in the future
• books left over from the Book Swap or from Scholastic orders
• leftover "rewards" from our classroom reward program.

I tie this "clearout" in with our class reward program,  which you can read about in this blog post.  I fill our token bucket with ALL of the students' tokens, and gather it together with all the items I plan to giveaway.  We settle into a nice shady spot on the playground,  and I randomly reach in and grab a token.  That student gets to choose one item to keep, and then s/he reaches into the token bucket to choose the next token/student.  We keep going until all the items have been given away. 

What is YOUR favourite end of year activity?  I'd love to hear about it!

Margie

Roll & Risk Place Value Game Grades 2-4

Our school board has a "numeracy framework" from Grades 1 to 8, which sets out the order in which the various math units and strands are taught, and also indicates which lessons from our core resource (Nelson Math) can be used, as well as additional resources such as the Ontario Guides to Instruction in Mathematics, Super Source lessons, etc.  At the moment all grades are working on the first Number Sense strand, which focuses on counting, the "how muchness" of a number, and representing numbers in a variety of ways.

Grade 3/4

Today I worked in a Grade 3/4 classroom, introducing the game Roll & Risk.  This game reviews regrouping 2 digit numbers using dice and Base 10 blocks in an engaging manner.  After creating a two-digit target number by rolling a die twice (first roll for the tens digit; second roll for the ones), pairs of students work towards rolling the die and adding the appropriate number of Base 10 blocks, getting as close to their target number as possible without going over.  Each roll can be taken as either a tens or ones.  For example, with a target number of 43, and a first roll of 5, students will have to decide if they should take 5 tens or 5 ones.  They soon realize that taking 5 tens will immediately push them over their target number of 43, so take it as 5 ones, and continue rolling, regrouping ones as tens when necessary.  As they get closer and closer to their target number, they must decide when they should stop rolling.  After a couple of rounds of the game students realize that once their within 6 numbers of their target number, it is getting risky to roll again.                                                                                                                                                
                                                                                                                                                                                                   

The classroom was humming as the students discussed game strategies with their partners, and when I walked around with guiding questions, I could see that they were understanding not only the regrouping that was being reviewed from a previous year, but also the probability concepts necessary to success for this game.  When students got off track (one pair had a target number of 99 which I naturally questioned), it took only a quiet question or two to get them back on track (ie. "What is the largest possible number you can roll on one die?").

I can't take credit for the creation of the game; it was developed as part of the Ontario Ministry of Education's "Edugains" site, and full lesson plans can be found at this link:  Roll and Risk  On the right you will see "Counting & Representation; if you scroll down under that title you will find "Base Ten - Game 1" and Base Ten - Game 2".  Game 1 is for 2 digit numbers and Game 2 is for 3 digit numbers.  The full game summary as well as the recording sheet can be found by clicking on "Printable Documents" over Counting & Representation.

I've also created a Smart Notebook resource to introduce both versions of the game.  Students love coming up and rolling the interactive dice, and the cloned Base 10 blocks make it easy for students to understand the regrouping that is part of the game.  Check it out here:  Roll & Risk Smart Notebook Place Value Game

 Tomorrow I'll be doing a similar game, only with subtraction, with a Grade 6 class.  Have a great day!
Margie