Ways to Count Down to the End of the School Year

It’s a little shocking to me how little time in school my daughter has left for this school year. It feels like seventh grade has flown by and we’ll be done and into summer in no time.

If you want to mark the remaining days — in the classroom or at home — this collection of end of the school year countdown ideas is a fun way to do it.

If you have enough days left to do this for everyone in your classroom, this idea from Sparkling in Second Grade is super sweet. Each child gets to be the student of the day one day and the other kids say or write a nice thing about that student. Then the child can keep those nice words, and it serves as a classroom countdown to the end of the year as the number of pictures dwindles.

The Sassy Apple Teaching has a fun list of 16 end of year activities you can make into a chain and have a different child break the chain to see what the activity is each day. You can of course alter this one if there are things you can’t do or you don’t have that many days left. Or just make your own list and write the ideas on paper looped to make a chain.

Around the Kampfire has a nice list of end of year traditions including a countdown that lasts five days. Each idea includes a simple snack and printable activities you can grab from Teachers Pay Teachers. (Other fun ideas include kindness notes, end of year awards and a printable memory book.)

Another fun set of end of year activities you can add to your chain or just do on their own comes from Amy Lemons. There are art projects, solar smores, even a pickle day to make the end of the year super memorable.

I don’t know why Pinterest just suddenly decided I needed to see all the content about task cards and task boxes for kids, but these ideas are great for the classroom to keep in centers or have on hand for early finishers. You can also use them at home as quiet bags or boxes for kids to use when younger siblings might be sleeping, or in the car for a non-screen activity.

Let’s take a look at some fine motor skill task cards and how you can use them to teach kids skills while they play.

Pre-K Pages has a nice set of playdough task cards you can use in boxes or bags with a little tray (or they can just work on the table if they are sitting at a table). Working with clay or play dough is a great fine motor skill exercise, or you can add these to your playdough center if you have one to give them a little bit of direction while they work.

Teaching Mama has a bunch of great ideas for fine motor task boxes, from practicing working a glue bottle to threading beads, using clothespins or scissors, dropping water, finger painting and more. There’s a free printable that shows all the task options she talks through in the post if you want to make your own little boxes, or just keep these ideas on hand when you’re ready to add some fine motor fun to your days.

One of the ideas she mentions in that post is working with a hole punch, and Early Learning Ideas has a whole bunch (the urge to write “hole bunch” is strong) of ideas for printables that help kids practice hole punching, whether it’s a strip with circles on it for them to punch or pictures that include circles for punching, these ideas make it a little more fun to practice this important skill.

My Happy Place Teaching has a whole post about using fine motor task boxes in kindergarten, and her paid resource includes more than 100 task ideas with printables. But if you don’t need 100 boxes you can still get some good ideas from this post about different tasks to include and why and when you can use them. She also mentions using them in the morning while you’re busy with kids coming in at different times, which is a great idea.

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