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End of School Year Activities to Promote Reflection

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The end of the school year brings a lot of excitement. It is a time for celebrating students’ growth, achievements, perseverance, and accomplishments. While students often spend those last few weeks of school looking ahead—to summer, to vacations, to the next step in their education— teachers will find it beneficial to encourage students to look back on their year and reflect.

Reflection as a process
To reflect on something, in the general sense, means to look back on and consider a past occurrence. However, in the educational realm, reflection can be more of a structured process.

A student:
1) learns something or absorbs information,
2) assesses prior knowledge of the topic,
3) considers the new information,
4) uses or practices the new skill or information, and then
5) examines how he or she can utilize the skill/info for further learning and growth.

With this cyclical process in mind, teachers can promote contemplation and metacognition at the end of the year by asking students to ponder what they have learned, revisit the difficult moments/skills, make connections to how this knowledge can serve them in the future, and consider additional learning opportunities.

Benefits of reflective practices

  • Reflection promotes retroactive problem-solving skills. Students have an opportunity to look back on their work and consider in what other ways they could have approached a task or completed a project. If forces them to examine the steps that they took and how they could improve on that same task the next time.
  • Reflection gives students a stronger sense of responsibility and ownership over their work. By revisiting completed work or writing from earlier in the year, students are reminded of the fact that, while they earn a grade from the teacher, every decision that they make regarding an assignment is what contributes to that grade—they hold the keys to their success or failure.
  • They get to know themselves as learners when examining their academic strengths and weaknesses. This level of self-examination encourages students to capitalize on their strong points and consider how they can improve on their weaker areas.
  • Reflection also promotes creativity. During the process, students consider alternate ways that a goal or task could have been accomplished. In asking themselves how they would approach a similar task next time based on what they know now, students automatically brainstorm new approaches, strategies, and techniques to expand their understanding for the next opportunity.

Activities to try

  • Ask students to evaluate the class using a Google form: What was interesting, boring, repetitive, beneficial, etc.? What improvements would they like to see if they had to complete the class over again? What advice would they offer to next year’s students? What unit, project, or topic was the most enlightening? What information or knowledge will they be most likely to take with them moving forward through their education?
  • Ask students to use Padlet or another form of whole group sharing platform to provide advice for future students.
  • Use a day of class to host the “Academy (Academic) Awards” in which students are recognized for their various strengths: BEST PUNCTUALITY, BEST PARTICIPATOR, BIGGEST HELPER, BEST QUESTIONS, BEST CREATIVE INFLUENCE, etc.
  • Make a Rose & Thorn or top 10 list. Ask students to consider their best memories or experiences during the school year. Encourage them to talk about what made that memory great.
  • Portfolios, especially for arts and English courses, allow students to have a physical “scrapbook” of their progress and achievements from throughout the year. For teachers, this will take a little bit of prep work early on, but the data that can be gathered from these portfolios is beneficial to our own professional growth and reflection as well!

Using Poetry to Spark Ideas for Creative Expression

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April is National Poetry Month, which may be cause for celebration or cynicism—poetry does tend to polarize people. For students, especially, poetry is sometimes seen as daunting or elusive. Young readers are quickly turned off when they feel like they can’t find the “true meaning” or interpret the secret message within the poem. However, for poetry-lovers, much of the appeal comes from the fact that poetry allows us to see how others have chosen to express themselves using language. We pro-poetry people also enjoy dissecting poems for multiple meanings—there’s never just one right answer! To engage students of all ages, there are plenty of suggestions on how to bring a poetry unit to life. Similarly, families can get involved and celebrate poetic forms of expression as well.

Poetry at school
For beginners, the concept or focus of a poem does not have to be complex or profound in order for readers to enjoy it. The point of poetry is to get something—anything—out of the text. Present students with simplistic forms of poetry so that they can see how even the simplest message in an acrostic poem can create vivid imagery.

Perfect, plump paws pitter patter.
Up the stairs, he wiggles,
Planning to join his human in a warm cozy bed.
Poised for a nap, he
Yawns as he nestles his belly under the blankets

Ask students to discuss which specific words helped them to picture the puppy. What else did they see or imagine while reading? Did this evoke memories for them? If teachers are hoping to spur students’ writings, ask them to create their own acrostic poem after seeing an example. Using a simple topic or starting point, such as a favorite animal or place, allows children to have some sense of guidance or parameters for writing, but still keeps them in control of the overall message of the poem.

A Haiku, in my opinion, is the most underrated form of poetry. This Japanese style appears simple, structurally, but is actually much more sophisticated. A Haiku really forces the writer to prioritize his message while making every syllable count. The challenge for students is that their goal is to say something meaningful in the simplest manner:

Keep your memories
For they will remind you that
Nothing else can last

For struggling readers and writers, the beauty of the Haiku is that it looks much more approachable, both to read and to construct. When writing, the key to the Haiku that students must understand is that each line of the 3-line poem has a specific number of syllables. The poem can truly be about anything, so long as the 5-7-5 syllable pattern is met.

A found poem is another great method for getting students interested in analyzing and creating poetry. A found poem, sometimes called a blackout poem, is essentially like a collage of circled words and phrases, from any type of written source, that is put together to form a new poem. In order to create a found poem, students must start with a page of text. This can be from a newspaper, magazine article, text book, novel, or even another poem. Students must read the text, scanning for words that they could circle and use in their own poem. They can only use words or phrases found on the page of the original source to construct their poem.

A found poem is a great way for struggling or reluctant writers to try their hand at poetry. It is almost like a scavenger hunt with an entire page of text to use as a wordbank. The writer at least has a springboard for writing the poem because any words or phrases that they can use are already right there on the original page.