A Powerful Way to End the School Year

One of our strategies that teachers enjoy using at the end of the school year is a practical, easy-to-use tool we call Celebrating Learning With Year Mapping. This activity gives your current students a chance to feel good about what they’ve learned and provides incoming students an opportunity to see real evidence that they can be successful learners in the coming school year. And it gives teachers a chance to enjoy seeing students share what they’ve learned and to internalize their successful teaching.

Several elements of this strategy make it a powerful way to end the school year with a positive experience, often much needed after testing is over and as a busy year comes to an end. With prompted recall, each student can remember learning events that mean the most to them. Year-end mapping utilizes the power of positive teacher-student relationships as well as personalized learning, summarizing, group learning, and organizing information graphically.

Creating the Presentations

The following steps can be used to create a visual representation of key content studied over the year, which can become a catalyst for celebrating learning successes:

1. As the end of the year approaches, tell your students they’ll be using graphic organizers to create a large map of what they’ve learned about the content you’ve taught.
2. Guide students in groups of four to work on specific parts of the curriculum, using prompted recall to help them remember important learning events, knowledge, and skills learned during the year.
3. Assemble a giant map—a collection of the group maps—ideally on a large wall space of the classroom.
4. Ask each student in turn to present one part of the map. These short presentations could include materials that helped them learn, such as books, drawings, pictures, notes, articles, or other meaningful artifacts.
5. Rehearse the presentations.
6. Invite groups of students who may be in your class next year to come to the presentations and be taught by your current class.

Read the entire post on Edutopia.