End of year activities – Fun ideas for KS1 and KS2
Round off the summer term and give your class a fond farewell with these free ideas and activities for KS1 & 2…
- by Teachwire
It’s that time of the year when things start to wind down and loosen up. You still want the children to actually learn something, though. Here are some great end of year activities, resources and ideas to celebrate the school year, recap everything you’ve learnt and send the kids off into the summer holidays in style.
(If you’re looking for festive ideas instead, look at our Christmas activities round-up. We also have secondary school end of term activities and back to school activities.).
Year 6 end of year activities
There’s something unique about the leap from primary to secondary. Your Year 6 leavers will go from being the biggest and oldest children in a comparatively small school, to being the littlest and youngest in a much bigger setting.
Been busy preparing for the end of the school year and haven’t had much of a chance to think about seeing the little scamps off to secondary? We’ve rounded up some great Year 6 end of year activities and ideas for you. We also have a separate round-up of transition day activities.
Compose your own Year 6 leavers song
Writing your own Year 6 leavers song is a fun, hands-on activity that is great for the summer term. This PDF contains instructions on how to write and perform an easy four-chord anthem as a class.
Oh, the Places You’ll Go
Use Dr Seuss’ classic picturebook and this free activity pack from literacy resources website Plazoom to cover literacy and PSHE in UKS2. The activities make the perfect project for Year 6 leavers, giving them a chance to:
- Articulate their hopes and ambitions, and identify some of the attitudes, behaviours and skills they might need to achieve them
- Enjoy a shared reading-for-pleasure experience and build on it
- Interrogate text and pictures to extend their understanding and discover different meanings
- Explore aspects of challenge, opportunity and change through drama, creative writing and art
- Develop their understanding of story structure
- Gain insight into their own emotions and those of others
- Explore quotations and choose one they find meaningful
Introduce secondary subjects
During lockdown, teacher Emily Weston asked a range of secondary teachers to create a short presentation introducing their subject, a topic from it and a short activity children can complete.
Find all the secondary subject slides here and give Y6 pupils a comprehensive look at the Y7 curriculum.
Transition activity sheet
This activity sheet helps Y6 children think about their current school, and the new one that awaits them in six weeks. They’ll think about similarities and differences between the two and things they’ll remember about primary.
There’s also space to write about what they have achieved, things they would like to know about their new school, and what they are looking forward to.
For other year groups these transition book templates can be used with a range of structures to match the age/ability of your class.
Find the Year 6 activity sheets here and the transition books here.
Transition passport
This passport to Y7 from Plazoom allows Y6 children to write about themselves, reflect on their primary school successes and think about their new school.
Print the document as an A5 booklet and share it with Year 7 teachers to help them build relationships with your pupils.
Transition lesson plan
We all know that change can be difficult, and scary. This resource is ideal for putting your students at ease with their impending transition.
It’s an activity from Mind Moose, a digital platform that helps children maintain good mental health and wellbeing. It takes around 45 minutes to an hour to complete.
You can download a PDF of the lesson plan and a couple of worksheets for the activities. These include things like getting children to write a timeline of their lives, to see how much change they’ve already experienced, and how it made them feel, and grow.
10 leavers’ assembly ideas
If you’re after something a bit different for this year’s celebrations, this top 10 list of ideas for your leavers’ assembly has some corkers.
There’s a Harry Potter sorting hat activity and a Marvel superheroes theme. We love the fantastic ‘Class of 2100’ reunion. This puts a new spin on looking back on your time at primary. Kids dress up as their 90-year-old selves to reminisce about their time in education and what they went on to achieve in life.
End of year activities for all ages
School quiz PowerPoint
This free school quiz PowerPoint (with answers) is a surefire way to inject some energy and enthusiasm into your classroom. It makes the perfect end-of-year activity. This school quiz is most suitable for KS2 students, but you can easily adapt the PowerPoint to suit your class.
End of year bingo
This free end of year bingo game will have kids having fun out of their seats trying to get the information from their classmates to fill in their card.
The rules are simple: children will find a classmate matching each description and write his/her name in the box. Kids can go ahead and fill in blanks they already know. Alternatively, they can wander around asking friends if they fit one of the characteristics. The first person to fill five in a row wins.
The download also contains a blank version so you can customise it for your class.
Reflective worksheet
Provide pupils with this free end-of-year reflection worksheet and ask them to fill out their favourite memories from the past school year in the shapes provided. It will prompt children to think deeply about the highlights and challenges of the last year.
Easy low-prep activities
Write a letter to yourself
Ask pupils to write a letter to themselves about what they are proud of achieving over the last year. When they’re done, add a note to help each child to ‘remember’ how much they have learned, or a special quality you have noticed. Children can open the letters in their new class after the holidays to help them feel recognised and more confident.
Selfie postcard
Invite children to write a postcard to send to their new teacher. Ask pupils to describe the things they have enjoyed about the last year and write about what they are looking forward to next year.
Have children decorate the picture side of the postcard with a ‘selfie’ and pictures of some of things they are looking forward to doing.
Wishes jar
Encourage children to write down ideas of what they are looking forward to doing next year and post them into a jar. Read them at carpet time to help children talk about next year.
Some children might benefit from writing frames with sentence starters on them such as: I am excited about…, I would like to try…., I am worried about…, I would like to improve…
You can also adapt this idea into a ‘worry jar’ for children to share worries or anxieties about the future. Keep these anonymous.
If you’re looking forward to…
Introduce this fun circle game to children. Invite them to sit or stand in a circle. Repeat the refrain “If you’re looking forward to __________, next year, swap places.”
Each time, children must move into a different place in the circle. Add different ideas in the gap. Try these ideas: going swimming, riding my scooter to school, using the climbing apparatus, doing harder maths.
Can the children think of an idea to put in the gap?
Looking-forward telescopes
Make some ‘looking-forward telescopes’ by decorating cardboard tubes from paper towels or wrapping paper.
Provide some small paper circles for children to draw what they see through the telescope. Is there something exciting happening at school that they could draw?
Thanks to Judith Harries for these ideas. Judith is an experienced early years and primary school teacher.
My School Superhero end-of-term writing activity
Who’s been a real superhero in your class or school this term? As the year draws to a close, this free writing activity from Plazoom is an ideal way for children and adults to share positive feedback about each other.
They can highlight things they’ve learnt and the progress they’ve made together for a truly uplifting wall or corridor display.
Create post-it note artwork
This fun, creative project recognises the joy of the whole primary school experience – not just the academic side – and encourages pupils to share the best bits of absolutely everything from the year.
You’ll need the following materials:
- felt tip pens or pencils
- sticky notes
- background
How to do it
Provide your class with a series of questions, headings, photographs or big ideas to talk about in pairs, groups or as a class.
The prompts you choose will largely depend on your cohort, so have a think about what approach would best suit them. Will they react well to written prompts or might they need pictures, too?
Each child will ultimately need to choose nine prompts to respond to, in order to create their artwork.
Example prompts
- What is your favourite memory of the year?
- Who have you enjoyed spending your time with at school?
- What has been your favourite school lunch?
- Who has been your teacher this year?
- How have you travelled to school?
- What has been your favourite subject?
- What book you have you enjoyed reading?
- How have you spent your playtimes?
- What has your classroom looked like this year?
- What is the funniest thing that has happened in class?
Remind pupils of school trips, special assemblies, visitors, theme days, topics, sports days and any other significant events from the year.
Putting pen to paper
After an adequate amount of time strolling down memory lane, give your class access to drawing and colouring materials and a bundle of sticky notes.
Their task is to draw one memory on each of nine sticky notes. Ask them to first sketch out their pictures in pencil, then colour them in.
Encourage detail, for example, by asking pupils to try to show emotion on the faces they draw to really capture the feeling each memory evokes.
When the drawings are finished, ask children to carefully go over the image outlines in black felt tip pen or fine liner to make the images really stand out.
Once pupils have completed their drawings, it’s time to assemble them onto the backgrounds. Lay the backings out on a table and ask pupils to place the sticky notes in a 3 x 3 square formation on top of it, leaving a little gap between each.
When each child is happy with their image placement, provide them with glue to stick the notes down on the background.
Finally, help the children add a title to their artwork, such as My Time in Year 6 or My First Year in School.
These mini masterpieces will make a lovely keepsake for the end of the school year and deserve to be framed and hung in pride of place on the wall.
Adele Darlington is an experienced teacher, art lead and primary art consultant. She is also the author of the Bloomsbury title 100 ideas for Primary Teachers: Art.
Career photo collage
This one shouldn’t take much effort, but it makes for a nice keepsake for you and your pupils. Have students write on a chalkboard what they want to be when they grow up. Next, take a picture then make a class collage with all the children on.
Create an end-of-year video
If you’ve been so caught up in the end-of-year shenanigans that you’ve not had time to think of the best send-off for your class we’ve rounded up some fantastic school dance routines, songs and celebrations that can inspire your own fun and games.
There’s inspiring poetry, paper waterfalls and the hilarious charm of kids talking about what they think you do over the summer.
Another option is to create your own lip-sync music video. Choose a song with some fitting lyrics. Next, shoot your own music video as a nice memory for your students (and teachers, of course).
An alternative spin, of course, is to write your own lyrics for the children to sing over the top of a well-known hit. And this video gets extra points for weaving in snippets of the kids talking about what they want to be when they grow up.
If you’re looking for something a little different to the old song-and-dance routines, why not get your Year 6s to film a mini movie? Check out this one from Earlsmend Primary for inspiration.
Reflection questions
Getting children to reflect on everything they’ve learnt and achieved may be an obvious starting point, but that doesn’t mean you can’t save time by finding a pre-written list of questions to start yourself off. Like this one.
And you can also download them as task cards if you prefer.
Class word clouds
This end-of-year activity makes a great gift for kids to take away. Print out lists of everyone’s name in the class (yours included). Then get everyone to fill the sheet out using one positive word to describe each person.
Then input those answers into a word cloud generator and print out each child’s personalised page of positive traits.
Movie and popcorn day
No, we’re not suggesting you spend the last day handing the ‘teaching’ over to some DVDs!
This American resource has some great educational activities to go along with a fun day of turning the classroom into a cinema (only without the extortionate prices).
12 effective activities
If you’re just after a simple list of ideas to try out then this post features 12 effective lessons and activities to teach at the end of the school year.
Survey and photo activity
It’s the end of the year, so the weather is hopefully nice and suitable for this activity. First, you get children to fill out this survey of their favourite things (which you can print off here).
Then you can all go outside and take a nice photograph of each of the children, before putting their survey answers over the pic on a computer.
Art activities
Hands-on, fun art activities will always go down a treat at the end of a school year. This list has a nice selection for you to choose from.
Maths ideas
There are some end of year activities for inside the classroom and out here. They include STEM challenges, a paper aeroplane contest and parachute testing (not real ones, thankfully). Or have a go at a pirate escape test or making a fractions chart.
End of year enterprise project for Year 6
Make the end of term memorable for Year 6 by sending them into the dragons’ den…
You’ve all worked your proverbial backsides off to get to SATs week – and then comes a post-SATs lull. To fill this void, why not run an enterprise scheme?
How it works
The idea is that you put children into groups and task them with creating a business. Each group has to come up with an idea. This might be a service industry business, where you charge to provide a service to someone, or pupils could buy or make a product and then sell it.
Once the groups have decided on a business model, they need to work out their costs and profits, and make an appointment with the headteacher to pitch for a £50 starting fund.
The plan is that all money made is returned to the school to cover costs. Any profits go to charity.
You’ll need to teach pupils about costings, profit margins, gross and net profit, and all the other basic concepts you need to run a business.
Getting started
Once each group has presented their business plan, work with them to revise their plans if necessary. Then the real hard work starts.
Designate a fortnight over which the businesses can borrow a table from class and come out to the front of the school to sell their goods.
Allow each group to book two slots at the front of the school at pick-up time – or if it’s a service industry idea, they can offer their services over the full two weeks.
Benefits
Seeing all the children’s hard work pay off and the profits roll in is glorious. They learn so much from this project, and will apply their knowledge from so many of the areas you’ve studied.
Chris Youles is the author of the bestselling books Sentence Models for Creative Writing and Teaching Story Writing in Primary. A classroom teacher with 19 years of experience, he has been an assistant head, English lead, writing moderator and a specialist leader in education.
