Ending the school year right

The end is near!

For some, that is a welcome phrase. You and your students have worked hard. You all deserve time to refresh yourselves, to relax and to reflect on the past year and the year to come.

For Teachers - End the school year on a positive note
Whether you’re a beginning teacher or a veteran, we can all benefit from reviewing what we’ve done in the past and looking for new ways to strengthen our teaching skills.

Be sure all paperwork is done and submitted on time.

Thank students, parents, and colleagues for a good year – in person or with a quick personal note.

Sort and file materials for use next year. If you’ll be teaching the same subject or same grade level, take the time now, while it’s still fresh in your mind, to review lesson plans and sequencing and make notes about things that were especially successful – or things that you need to work on before you try them again.

Make sure you understand what can and what cannot be left in the classroom over the summer. Nothing’s worse than returning to school in the fall and finding paint all over your materials.

Over the course of the school year, you’ve probably identified areas of classroom instruction, content or even personal relations skills that you feel could be improved. After reflecting on things that went well – and those that didn’t – develop a plan on how to address identified needs during the summer recess.
Remember – how the school year ends can be just as important as how it begins.

For Students
For some students, the time between the end of one year and the beginning of the next is not so good. Hard-learned skills get fuzzy from lack of use. The months of June, July and August don’t always provide the kind of activities and opportunities that reinforce learning.

Some call it the “summer activity gap.” Research by Tiffani Chin and Meredith Phillips, “The Season of Inequality: Exploring the Summer Achievement Gap,” (American Educator, summer 2005) confirms that:

While most children learn at about the same pace during the school year, poor children tend to fall behind academically during the summer months. In terms of grade-level equivalents, the reading gap between low- and middle-income children widens by more than three months.

The summer activities of 32 Southern California children who had just completed fourth grade were studied to investigate how and why students from different social class backgrounds had disparate summer experiences. The differences in children’s summer experiences resulted largely from differences in their families’ financial resources, knowledge, and time – but not from a lesser desire to expose their children to enriching educational experiences.

Chin and Phillips also found that “some of the most egregious summer inequalities were not explicitly academic. Rather, poor children were most disadvantaged in terms of their opportunities to develop their artistic, musical, and athletic talents and to experience new environments.”

While this research looked specifically at social class background, there is reason to be concerned about the summer learning opportunities for all students.

You can help!
For starters, a quick search on Google using the term “end of the school year” turned up 331 million hits! They included suggestions for lessons to end the school year as well as things to suggest for the summer. There are bound to be at least one or two references that resonate for you and your students! Here are some other suggestions:

Prepare a calendar for the time between the last day of this school year and the first day of the next school. Include one activity for each day.
Each week include a balance of activities for reading, writing, math, science, social studies, physical education, art and music.

Use the internet or almanacs to highlight special days, holidays and other observances.

Download a copy of “Summer Fun With Reading” from the KPIRC Web site (Kansas Parent Information Resource Center). The 12-page booklet is available in English and in Spanish. Make it available to families. Also at this Web site are activities that reinforce math and science concepts, vocabulary, fluency, phonics, phonemic awareness and comprehension plus hundreds of activities for K, 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade students.

As students review for end-of-year/semester tests or other culminating activities, have them generate questions and answers that relate to what they’ve learned. Use the questions to make up games using popular game-show formats.

Be sure that students know about local library schedules, including bookmobile sites, where applicable.