When the pandemic led to worldwide school closures over international journal the past few years, educators, families, and students had to get creative about graduations and year-end celebrations. From local car parades to social media yearbooks and nationally broadcast graduation events, people found ways — both big and small — to recognize students’ accomplishments and give them a sense of closure.
This year, things are closer to “normal,” but we can still be creative in recognizing and celebrating students’ accomplishments. Use this list of ideas to help you plan some fun end-of-year activities — we’ve included a special section at the end for celebrating the class of 2022. Many of the ideas here play out in the digital world, but we’ve mixed in some offline options as well.
We hope these activities bring you and your students some much-deserved joy as we close out the 2021–2022 school year.
Post a Flipgrid asking students to share one accomplishment from the year that they’re proud of. Make a Flipgrid Mixtape of the responses, and share the video with students and their families.
Create a virtual yearbook using Google Slides or any other presentation tool. Add a student’s name and photo on top of the slide and have classmates contribute their favorite qualities and memories about that student. Tip: Use this handy template we created to get started!
Create a word cloud for each student by asking each of their peers to submit one word they would use to describe the student. Streamline the process by sending students a Google Form that lists all students’ names, with space where students can type in their one-word response for each student.
Use iMovie or Animoto to stitch together photos from the school year into a video celebrating your students.
Plan a dress-up or themed day (either in person or virtual). Try one of these fun theme ideas: pajamas, superheroes, funny hat, school colors, wacky hair, Disney character, or favorite animal!
Have your students dance along with this GoNoodle video: “Celebrate” from Blazer Fresh.
Make your students a celebratory playlist of favorite songs from the school year. You can also ask your students to create and share their own playlists!