The Last Days of School: 4 Fun Activities Your Students Will Love
Four simple HITS—Four Corners Chaos, Real-Life Detective, Future Headline, and Chain Reaction—help keep students thinking, talking, and engaged during the final days of school.
Let's be honest.
The last few days of school are different. It’s a time when another worksheet isn't going to save the day for teachers and giving students “free days” won’t fly with admins.
What if you fight different with different?
What you need are activities that require movement, create curiosity, and a bring a little fun without requiring hours of prep or cleanup.
Here are four HITS (High Impact Teaching Strategies) that are perfect for this (and any, really) time of the year.
1. Four Corners Chaos
Need to wake up a sleepy classroom? Give students something to argue about.
Label the four corners of the room:
Strongly Agree
Agree
Disagree
Strongly Disagree
Then read a funny, weird, controversial, or debatable statement:
A hot dog is a sandwich.
Aliens definitely exist.
Math is better than science.
Summer should be six months long.
Students move to a corner, defend their position, challenge other groups, and debate their reasoning.
Do not forget to weave in some class content if you want or must—it’ll work.
The movement gets students energized. The discussion gets students engaged. And the occasional questionable argument makes everyone laugh.
And since they’re already up and you need to kill another 10 minutes, go on a Walk and Talk around the school building and ask students to partner up and argue one funny and one class-related statement while they walk.
2. Real-Life Detective
Students love solving mysteries.
Show an image connected to your content and challenge students to become detectives.
Their job is to:
Identify the concept being demonstrated
Gather evidence from the image
Explain how the evidence supports their conclusion
Examples:
A science teacher might show a landslide.
A social studies teacher might show an overcrowded city.
An ELA teacher might show a symbolic image from a novel.
A math teacher might show a real-world example of geometry or probability.
The goal is simple: find the clues, make your case, defend your conclusions.
Do you want to make it into a 50+ minute lesson? Ask students to find content-related images online and challenge each other to figure out what they represent. And let them argue about it ‘cause deeper thinking.
3. Future Headline
This activity asks students to think beyond what they've learned and imagine what comes next.
Give students a concept, event, problem, or topic from your course.
Then ask them to write a future newspaper, website, or social media headline.
Examples:
Scientists Discover Unlimited Clean Energy
Mars Colony Celebrates 25th Anniversary
Local River Fully Restored After Decades of Pollution
New Technology Eliminates Traffic Accidents
Students then explain why that headline might become reality and support their prediction using evidence from class content.
The activity combines creativity, application, and argumentation in just a few minutes.
And you can turn it into a full day’s lesson by asking students to write the actual article in a small group and create an image to go with it.
4. Chain Reaction
This is one of the simplest review activities you'll ever use.
Choose a concept, process, event, vocabulary term, or big idea.
Students stand.
Teacher starts an explanation or story connected to a class topic.
Moving rapidly and randomly around the room, each student adds:
a word
a phrase
or a sentence
Each contribution must connect to the previous response.
After contributing successfully, students sit down.
The challenge?
If someone hesitates for more than three seconds, repeats an idea, or gives incorrect information, the chain starts over. The pressure creates focus. The teamwork creates engagement. And the retrieval practice helps reinforce learning without students even realizing they're reviewing. Pretty fly for a non-Jedi, don’t you think?
Why These Anytime Activities Work Well At The End
The final days of school are not the time to scream for attention. They're the time to use curiosity, movement, discussion, prediction, and challenge.
These four HITS work because they feel different.
Students move, talk, think, and laugh.
Most importantly, they remain actively involved in learning during a time when many classrooms are in full shutdown mode.
One Last Thought
The final two days of school don't need to be academically perfect.
They should be memorable.
A little movement. A little curiosity. A little fun. That's often enough to finish strong.
And you know what else?
Your students will remember you and these activities long after they've forgotten the worksheet you almost handed out instead. Just sayin’.
Sign Up below to get more High Impact Teaching Strategies (HITS) like the four above.
My new book High Impact Teaching Strategies: 100 Brain-Based Strategies for Building Better Learners is set for release on August 1st and I plan to offer it at 50% off to the first 100 buyers, so sign up to get notified when it drops.
BOOKS & TOOLS
Flashcards are okay but there's a better way. The Memory (or Mind) Palace Method is a powerful learning and memorization technique that when mastered allows a student to remember 10, 20, or even 30 vocabulary words or concepts (definitions included) with ease.
And, they actually remember what they learned using memory palaces! This series of lessons (which can be used as classroom handouts) walks students through creating their first memory palace, filling it with information they need to learn, and using it to train their memories. It also contains short readings, a video lesson, memory palace examples, and practice drills.
Fair Use
Feel free to use with your students. Please do not share it with other parties or use for profit. All rights by crushschool.com.
Equity-Promoting Classroom Poster. What does EQUITY in the classroom look like?
Everyone has a different start and finish line
Quality is more important that quantity
Understanding that diversity makes us stronger
Inclusion despite beliefs, appearances, and circumstances
Thoughtfulness lowers barriers and reduces biases
Yesterday's mistakes are today's learning agenda
You can teach your students about equity and make it a daily classroom practice using this inspirational poster, which also includes images that accompany the equity description. You can discuss each letter characteristic with your students as a way of introducing your inclusive classroom and display it prominently as a reminder that diversity makes the classroom community stronger.
In this classroom Mistakes are Expected, Respected, Inspected, Corrected!
Learned helplessness is a result of years of conditioning that mistakes are bad for learning. Nothing is further from the truth - some of the most powerful life lessons come from making mistakes, reflecting on them, and growing as a result.
This is a PNG Poster you can print and display in your classroom to encourage a culture of risk-taking and learning from mistakes.
In this 3- to 4-day lesson, designed for a high school Earth and Space Science classroom, student groups are assigned and investigate 4 leading solutions to the climate change crisis our planet is experiencing. Then, they are called upon to debate against each other to try to convince others that their solution is the most viable and provide counterarguments against other solutions. It’s an intellectual thunderdome in which students are encouraged to use science to attacks each others points of view on climate change but not character.
Why and how does this learning strategy work?
Rote memorization out; seeking answers and deeper learning in.
The debate-style approach to learning is engaging and motivating for learners, because they are challenged to use real evidence and their wits to outmaneuver their opposition.
Not only do they act as investigators, developing communication, collaboration, and argumentation skills but they learn about viable solutions to the climate change conundrum we all find ourselves in. They learn Earth and Space Science content while investigating and debating solutions to a real-world phenomenon, which is what the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) call for.
Student Learning and Performance Objectives:
Research multiple, complex climate change solutions to discover that the world is more complicated than a single TikTok trend.
Articulate scientific arguments with actual evidence.
Listen to opposing viewpoints, to hone "social awareness" skills.
Realize that climate change solutions are multi-faceted, messy, and require more than just good vibes.
Describe and support with, not mere belief but actual evidence, the leading climate solutions proposed by, not the coven of online witches but the scientific community.
What's included:
24 slides that introduce, explain, and guide the teacher and students
Detailed teacher notes on prep, main lesson, and follow up activities
General Lesson flow for teacher to follow to make it all seamless
A short and funny “hook” to increase student buy in
Detailed student directions
A list (research starter pack) of links to legit, scientific websites for students to use.
Group roles (team jobs) with descriptions of what each entails.
4 climate change solutions to assign to 4 different student groups
Student Learning and Performance Objectives
Detailed Grading Rubric to guide students and make assessment easy
Debate Day introduction and format description
Follow up discussion questions (reflection and debrief)
Save planning time with this Atmosphere Unit, 5-day Honors Earth and Space Science Project in which students research, design, create, and present a 7-day weather forecast for a specific city in the US or abroad.
Student Performance and Learning Objectives:
Explain how weather data is collected and interpreted.
Explain how weather patterns may be affected by geography (mountains, plains, valleys etc.).
Explain the atmospheric conditions (pressure, moisture etc.) necessary for different weather (sunny, windy, rainy etc.).
What's included:
16 slides (Google Slides link for easy use and editing to fit your purposes)
Learning Objectives
Group Roles / Jobs (up to 5 with detailed description of jobs)
Detailed Project Directions / Requirements
Materials/Web Resources List
Link to a "Wheel of Names" containing city names - students spin and receive their assigned city.
Link to a grading rubric for student and teacher use (printable doc).
The project follows the guidelines set by the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).
Questions?
Email me at oskar@crushschool.com. I’m happy to answer your questions.
Fair Use
Feel free to share and use this resource with your students.
Please do not share it with other parties or use for profit. All rights by crushschool.com.
Retrieval Practice, Spaced Practice, and Mixed Practice (Interleaving).
Studying Hard is not the same as Studying Smart. This High Quality printable, digital (PNG) poster is a constant classroom reminder of best practices for teachers and learning the smart way for students.
