geralt / Pixabay

 

I had my final classes of this school year yesterday, and both my ELL Newcomer and IB Theory of Knowledge classes followed a somewhat similar agenda.

In both classes, I asked students ahead of time to prepare one inspirational sentence they would share with everyone “that would help their classmates get through the summer. The examples I gave included: “Things will get better!” “Have fun and be safe!” “At least you won’t have to see Mr. Ferlazzo!”

Students took that assignment seriously in both classes, and shared thoughtful messages.

Next, we played pictionary in both classes (by the way, this random word generator can help students figure out what to draw). I must have been doing something wrong, because I couldn’t get the whiteboard tool to work for everyone in Zoom but had a back up plan to use the great Whiteboard.fi application.

In my ELL class, students then competed to draw images of me (see a sample in the tweet below):

Students in my TOK class, on the other hand, had a competition to draw TOK concepts in three minutes.

Both ended with a special fun Quizizz game (here’s the one I used with TOK).

Various winners received texted $5 Amazon gift cards.

They were nice ways to end the year, and a good time seemed to be had by all.

Of course, another important element of ending any school year is to have students do anonymous student evaluations. Here are what students said about the ELL class and the TOK course.

I’m adding this post to The Best Ways To Finish The School Year Strong.