Keep your learners engaged: End of the year!

Home Stretch teachers! You can do this! It's time to pull out some tricks because the end is drawing close and engaging your students is in its toughest season of the school year. Here are tips and ideas for engaging students at the end of the year.

1. Keep the Routine

Students will behave their best if you stick with what you started with. For me, that means I start my day with spelling and end it with Bible (I teach in a private school). My students have been trained in this schedule all year and it works best to keep it the same.

We end with Bible Lesson

Keep working with routines

2. Add in some technology

You may decide to keep your schedule, but that doesn't mean you can't have fun! This time of year is a great time to do some projects together. My class used Flipgrid to share their research with each other. They were able to collaborate by commenting through video on each other's projects.
More about that HERE in my 7 ways to present digitally in the classroom.

LINK to resource

3. Increate Movement

The weather warms up and cools down to rain. They are either hyper from the awesome weather or cooped up from too many indoor recesses. This is the perfect time to use "brain breaks" or "Go Noodle"

4. Book Clubs

My students LOVE book clubs and they are strategically placed at the end of the year. They are a fun way to keep kids reading. It also helps motivate them to find books they love before summer.

5. Fun Behavior Incentives

How about switching up your behavior incentive? One thing I love doing is selecting a student name and placing it in a special place. I tell my students that I have selected a name for the day. If that student behaves well, then they are rewarded with x,y, or z. If not, they will never know who it was and their name goes back in the pile for another turn on another day.

6. STEM activities

These activities are fun too! Get their brains thinking about science, technology engineering, and math. This is a good opportunity for collaboration as well.

Link to resource HERE

Easter Stem Challenges

Bring Stem fun into your Easter Celebrations this year! It is super easy and will give your students a holiday challenge to remember. Choose from three different STEM challenges including: Plastic Egg Races, Launching Peeps, and Building a home for Chick.

  

Other Activities to stimulate thinking include a writing craftivity, graphing Jelly Beans, and Crack the Code with a riddle. 

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7 Ways to Present Digitally in the Classroom

1.Book Talks/Reading Fluency- Great way to increase student’s reading engagement and improve books choices as well as encouraging them to read aloud. 

2.New Learning- Explaining how to use strategies can give you a quick formative assessment or help others learn who do not quite get it yet. This can happen on platforms such as flipgrid (see post here), boomlearning (see post here), google classroom, or seesaw

3.Classroom Community- It can be used for more than just academic purposes. You can send home get well messages or happy birthday notes.

4.Stem Demonstrations- Great way to share hard work since many design projects are hard to talk home.

5.Writing Celebrations- Fun way to celebrate the hard work that was put into a piece of writing.

6.Social Learning- Have kids present something they have learned using the “Sticky Situation” discussion script. This will empower others to make better choices.

Click HERE

7.Goal Setting- Celebrate academic achievement by explaining an accomplished goal and encourage others to achieve this goal by offering advice.

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