Meeting Learning Goals Right Up to the End of the Year

The last few weeks of school bring the usual accumulation of fairs, dances, fundraisers, and traditions. But joyful and memorable as they are, these well-meaning spring activities have an unintended consequence of pushing learning goals to the sides and intensifying the already demanding work of meeting the year’s breadth of academic standards.

The last stretch of the school year demands a structure designed to protect and consolidate the year’s learning despite the calendar’s competing priorities. Over the years, I’ve developed a strategy for working with the chaos of the season to strengthen the classroom bond and productivity (rather than pulling against it) while still moving students toward readiness for the next grade. Here’s how it works.

PRIORITIZE KEY STANDARDS

What are the nonnegotiables for your students this year? For instance, would it be grade-level sacrilege for them to move up without knowing how to subtract with borrowing, identify the equator, or list a handful of major presidents? Sometimes teachers become so entrenched in the bigger projects and new material, they miss when their students no longer remember essential content that hasn’t been asked of them for a while.

In one of my favorite review games, I make trivia cards with key grade-level content. In my best game show host voice, I put on a tie in front of them (my tying skills never cease to impress) and turn the review time into a trivia show. I find time in a pre-lunch or end-of-day circle to play it, and, without fail, when the tie comes out, students cheer that we’re entering game show mode.

Another strategy, less whimsical but very effective, is having a weekly packet that includes a mix of essential standards. This may include a few clocks to fill in, a couple of silly sentences to edit for grammar, an empty map with a list of grade-appropriate places to find, and a few math equations to keep their math operations front of mind.

It’s important to keep the packet consistent for several weeks, so that students have time to acclimate to the structure and catch up on gaps they reveal in the first week of working with it.

STRUCTURE THE DAY TO COMBAT SPRING FEVER

Whether you’re facing a normal interruption like PE or an assembly, or an additional one like a spring fair or group presentations, reserve the first hour of class time for high-impact work.

Anticipate the interruptions and compartmentalize the events that will throw off the focus. For example, if there’s a play at the end of the day, use a morning meeting to prepare students for when that will happen and when you’re going to have a super-focused (and quiet) work period.

The goal is to create a productive start to the day while setting clear expectations for whatever the schedule and energy may bring.

SMALL ROUTINES ARE KEY

As the structure that students rely on to grow as learners begins to erode, it’s important to keep what can remain intact regardless of the interruption. Frame the day around the simple, repeatable routines that students can rely on, no matter how small they are. This starts with how students arrive, organize themselves, and come together to begin the day.

One trap teachers often fall into is thinking, “Well, the day is wonky anyway. We might as well just have extra free time.” This may feel like a favorable alternative to tempting a rowdy transition for just a short period of work time, but it can also result in important academic gains being left unfinished.

Where possible, keep the same routines you’ve had all year, and when that isn’t possible, you can create new routines (like the aforementioned game show) to reinforce learning standards in those awkward time gaps. The repetition of the games becomes its own fun routine, and it feels less like each day was another that was patched together and slightly off.

Besides the game show idea, the below activities can all be introduced to students as small routines that keep learning at the forefront even when you are planning for an odd block of time due to something happening in the schedule.

• Would You Rather: Students justify their answers using knowledge from the year (e.g., Would you rather… read a story with a strong plot but weak characters or the opposite? Be a producer or a consumer in an ecosystem? Live during the Industrial Revolution or the Digital Age? Live in the Arctic or the Sahara?).
• Odd One Out: Students identify the odd one out and defend their reasoning (e.g., Nile, Amazon, Mississippi, Sahara; book, pencil, desk, honesty).
• Skip Count Catch: Toss a ball across the circle, while skip counting (3, 6, 9, 12…).
• Mystery Location: Give clues to a geographic place (e.g., “I’m in the Southern Hemisphere”; “I have the Amazon River”).

Keep class game materials in a special box that comes out during these short windows. The box itself comes to represent all the games inside it, so students understand what is going on, and the otherwise completely free time becomes structured and intentional.

ENCOURAGE STUDENT-LED LESSONS AND PRESENTATIONS

You can create time for student-led mini-lessons or presentations that allow students to demonstrate mastery. These can be about any content a student wants to share, or even about a passion outside of the content you’ve covered that school year. I make these totally optional and have found they allow students to show what they know and what they care about, and they lead to some really fun and motivating conversations for the entire class.

By making a few simple and intentional planning shifts for the end of the year, you can create a classroom in which learning carries through to the end, with celebrations that deepen, rather than distract from, the work of the year.