By Jules Rhee, MEd | Latest update 4/3/2026
Keep students engaged through the last day with team-building projects, games, crafts, and more. Practical end of year activities from a 30-year classroom veteran.
The last few weeks of school are their own special kind of exhausting. You’ve given everything you have all year, your students can practically smell summer, and somehow you still have to show up every day and make it count.
But the good news about those final weeks? They can actually be something worth looking forward to.
The end of year activities below are ones I came back to again and again in my own classroom. They’re organized by type so you can pick and mix based on what your class needs.
One thing worth doing before you plan anything: ask your students what they’d like to do.
You don’t have to say yes to everything, but incorporating even one or two of their suggestions makes a real difference in buy-in and behavior during those final days.
End of Year Team-Building Activities for the Classroom
These activities work well as standalone lessons and don’t require a lot of ongoing coordination. They’re especially good for helping your class finish the year feeling connected — which matters more than people realize when kids are about to scatter for the summer.
- Graffiti Wall: Set up a poster board or bulletin board in your classroom. Let students add messages, shout-outs, memories, and pictures. They can be as creative as they want to be. This graffiti wall can be left up in the room for your students to admire during the final weeks of school. It’s a great place to take photos of students for them to keep as memories.
- Summer Reading List: Work with the class to create a list of books they can read over the summer. Students should recommend books they’ve read that they think their classmates would enjoy. (This is an excellent opportunity to write some book reviews!) You can also add books that you think students will enjoy. Pinterest is full of book lists if you need some ideas!
- Book Review: Need a quick way to review books in your class? Try these quick Story Elements Flipbooks. You can use them with any book, so students can review the same book or different ones.
- Library Trip: After making a summer reading list, you could plan a trip to your local library. *Many libraries now offer an app that allows students (and everyone!) to borrow and read books on their electronic devices. Consider inviting a library representative to visit your class and set students up with a library card and the app (with parent permission, of course).
- Escape Room: You can plan a simple escape room, find pre-planned ones on Teachers Pay Teachers or work with students to design one for their classmates. This is a great activity to encourage team building.
End of Year Projects for the Whole Class
Group or whole class projects are fantastic for increasing class morale at the end of the school year. They give students a purpose for the last few weeks and provide an opportunity for students to work together. These are the types of projects that leave a lasting memory for your students over the summer.
- Yearbook: Work together as a class to create a yearbook that all students can take home. It can include articles, memories, and pictures. Students could also create a scrapbook.
- Class Newspaper: Your class can collaborate on a class newspaper. Let them report on events from the past school year. Was there a school play? Important sporting event? School field trips? They can interview classmates, teachers, and school staff. Students can report on these topics, and they can be published as a “newspaper”.
- Design Project – STEM: Let students work together to create something using design skills. They can work in small groups, as partners, or even as a whole class. Students could make treasure boxes, design clothing, build something, or learn a new skill. A popular project is designing and making a pinball machine!
- Food or snacks: You don’t need a kitchen to make this work. Frosting cookies, mixing no-bake cookies, popping popcorn, or building ice cream sundaes are all easy to pull off in a regular classroom, and food has a way of turning an ordinary afternoon into something students actually remember.
- Gardening: Students can make a garden at your school or plant flowers or plants to bring home. Using a water bottle to make a self-watering plant is always a fun and environmentally-friendly activity. Plus, students can keep the plants over the summer as a memory.
- Butterfly Craft Writing Activity: Students can write narrative stories or reports on topics of interest. The stories or reports can be written on these spring butterflies and displayed in the hallways or on classroom doors.
End of Year Activities for the Whole School or Grade Level
These ideas work at the class level too, but they’re especially powerful when the whole school or grade is involved. There’s something about seeing your students cheer for each other, or compete against another class in a potato sack race, that builds the kind of community that everyone remembers.
- Sports Day: A sports day should be planned for everyone to participate in. Older students could prepare this for the younger ones to join in and participate. Include running races, ball throws, bean bag races, egg and spoon, three-legged races, and much more! Keep it fun and engaging. Encourage students to support their team/group for spirit building. The point is not about who is the most athletic, but who can have the most fun and be the loudest!
- Picnic: Students could be taken outside on a warm day to enjoy their lunch on the grass. They can bring in blankets and outdoor games to enjoy. Let your students sit with their friends and enjoy the sunshine. You can even surprise them with ice cream or popsicle treats.
- Art Week: Take a whole week and dedicate it to art! Pick a theme that the entire school can plan various art activities around. There could be a whole class project, individual projects, and group projects. Plan to integrate art into your math, reading, science, and social studies lessons.
- STEM Day/Week: Again, take a week or a few days to focus on STEM (Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Students can work together to complete STEM-related projects like designing a popsicle stick bridge or the egg drop challenge. Let students perform science experiments like creating ice cream or designing a boat that will float.
- Class Assembly/Production/Talent Show: Each class can plan an end-of-year assembly or production for the whole school. Classes could write stories/narratives that can be changed into plays for other classes in the school to watch. Encourage all children to write their own songs, stories, and skits – and be creative!
End of Year Games for Elementary Students
When in doubt, play a game. Seriously. The last few weeks are not the time to introduce a new unit, but they are a great time to review skills in a way that doesn’t feel like review.
Games keep energy up, build friendships, and send students home with ideas they’ll actually use over the summer.
• Game Day: Why not pick one day and dedicate it to playing games? You can choose organized games, card games, outdoor games, ball games, or board games. More ideas include:
- Card Games: Uno, Rummy, Go Fish, or Crazy Eights
- Board Games: Yahtzee, Monopoly, Memories, Battleship, Chess, or Checkers.
- Indoor Games: Bingo, Heads-Up 7-Up, Charades, or Pictionary.
- Outdoor Games: soccer, soccer-baseball, tag, hide-and-seek, frisbee, hopscotch, or a scavenger hunt.
• Create your own Game: Get students working with partners or in small groups to create their own games. This could work in two ways.
- The first way is for students to recreate a game they already know using various resources that can be found in the classroom.
- The second way is for students to create a brand-new game. They must write rules, make a game board and pieces, and create a logo.
• Task Card Games: You can use a variety of task cards to review academic concepts taught earlier in the year. Set up task cards around the classroom and let students choose the ones they’d like to work on. Check out these fantastic task card games!
CLICK HERE to learn more about How to Energize Your Teaching with Task Cards – Keeping students engaged in your lessons can be easier than you think – try these simple teaching tweaks today.
Easy End of Year Activities for Early Finishers and Free Time
These are great fill-in-the-gap activities, perfect for morning work, early finishers, or those afternoons when you have 25 minutes and no real plan. Keep a few of these ready to go, and you’ll never be caught scrambling.
- Goals/Aspirations: Spend some time discussing and writing goals for the year ahead and the summer. What do your students want to achieve over the summer or next year? Do they want to improve their reading skills? Times Tables? Soccer? Singing? Let students choose meaningful goals and write about them. Encourage them to break their goals into actionable steps.
- Write letters or make cards for next year’s students: Students can write letters to next year’s incoming students. For example, students leaving fourth grade can write letters to give to the students who will be entering fourth grade next school year. They can draw and decorate cards.
- Puzzles and Coloring Pages: I usually provide a variety of puzzles and coloring pages for students to work on during movies, videos, and during extra time. These word searches are perfect for the end of the year.
- End of Year Writing Fun: Choose a writing craft for students to write their stories or reports on. There are so many themed crafts to create.
The one shown below is a quick and easy flower writing craft that comes in three different sizes. It’s a great way for students to publish a 5-sentence paragraph.
You’ve made it through another year. That’s no small thing.
These activities won’t make the last few weeks effortless, but they’ll make them worthwhile. Students will leave for summer after they’ve made something together, played something together, or written a letter to the kid who’ll sit in their seat next fall. That’s the kind of ending that makes the whole year feel complete.
Enjoy the last days. You’ve earned them.
Good luck in your last few weeks of school!
FAQ Section
What are good end-of-year activities for elementary students?
Team-building projects like a class yearbook or graffiti wall, games using task cards, outside days, and reflection activities like vision boards or writing letters to next year’s students all work especially well. The best activities give students something to create or do together — not just something to sit and watch.
How do you keep students engaged in the last week of school?
Mix up the routine as much as possible. Students disengage when every day feels the same, so the last week is a good time to introduce something completely different — a game day, a cooking project, an outside picnic. Ask students what they want to do, and work at least one of their ideas in. Their buy-in goes up significantly when they feel like they had a say.
What can teachers do on the last day of school?
A game day, a class picnic, a talent show, or finishing a project students started earlier in the week all work well. The last day doesn’t need to be elaborate; it just needs to feel like a celebration rather than a regular school day. Even small surprises like popsicles outside or a movie with popcorn go a long way.
How do you do end-of-year reflections with students?
Vision boards and letter-writing are two classics. Vision boards (posters) let students look forward because they fill them with goals and dreams for the summer and beyond. Letters to next year’s students are a meaningful way to remember the year as students think back about what they learned, what was hard, and what advice they’d give to someone just starting out.
What are some end-of-year STEM activities for the classroom?
The egg drop challenge, designing a popsicle stick bridge, building a self-watering plant from a water bottle, or planning a full STEM day around a theme all work well at the end of the year. These activities are engaging, require problem-solving, and give students something to be proud of — which is exactly what you want in May.
Is it okay to do non-academic activities at the end of the school year?
Absolutely, and honestly, many of the best end-of-year activities are both. Food-based projects can cover fractions and measurement. A class newspaper covers writing and research. A goal-setting activity covers reflection and planning. Learning doesn’t have to stop just because the energy shifts. It just has to look a little different.
Need MORE ideas for the end of the school year?
CLICK HERE to learn How to Pack Up Your Classroom at the End of the Year – Ready for the end of the school year? Be sure to grab the FREE checklists to make packing up a breeze.
CLICK HERE to learn about End of the Year Award Party for Students – Low-cost end of the school year class party ideas for teachers, including a student award ceremony with student award certificates and donut banquet.
CLICK HERE to read about Easy Ways to Boost Student Engagement ANYTIME During the School Year – Use these strategies for student engagement to grab and keep students’ attention today.
About the Author
Written by Jules Rhee, MEd, and a 30-year teaching veteran; published 5/11/2021; Last updated 4/3/2026.
Jules is the creator of Caffeine Queen Teacher (CQT) – Visual Math Organizers + Graph Paper Support. She’s a veteran teacher with over 30 years of classroom experience (SPED, upper elementary, and middle school) and a Master’s in Education (MEd). Jules shares practical, classroom-tested ideas and creates step-by-step resources that help students stay organized, confident, and successful – especially with multiplication and long division.
Read more about Jules here: About Page | Browse resources here: TpT Store
