The end of the school year can be glorious and horribly frantic all at the same time. Students are itching to get to summer and teachers likely are too! While relationships have been built and flourished throughout the school year, we move into this bittersweet time of knowing that change is around the corner. So how do we capitalize on this energy while bringing in much needed structure? Cue student projects.

Student projects are a fabulous way to showcase student learning and what better time to demonstrate all the progress that has been made than at the end of a school year?

Call it a culminating project. Call it a student showcase. Call it whatever you like. Bringing students together in a large-scale, mostly common goal, reinforces the unity of the classroom and helps them dial in their focus when it is often the hardest time to do so!

This approach can take many formats. It can be applied to most content areas (provided you can dig into your own creativity!)

Students are itching to get to summer and teachers likely are too! Relationships have been built and flourishing throughout the school year and we move into this bittersweet time of knowing that change is around the corner.

Choice Projects

Give your students options! Facilitating a project where students get to select from a variety of ways to showcase their knowledge is a beautiful way of differentiating learning.

This approach allows students to lean into their strengths and approach their work with confidence.

You could have students complete the same task – like writing – but with different outlines, styles, structures or supports.

Alternatively, you could have students research or present on the same topic but showcase their learning in different ways. While some students may lean heavily on art, others may prefer writing and still others may flourish in orally presenting their knowledge.

This “I am Poetry Choice Project” resource linked above is an example of this approach. While each student will write a poem about themselves, they get to pick a poetry format or outline they like best from the options in the resource. This particular resource is incredibly easy to facilitate as it has outlines, examples, and assessment tools that make teaching AND grading a breeze. Make sure to check it out!

Group Projects

While choice is a great way to capture student interest, group work often makes the project goal seem more attainable.

Group projects allow students to have the space to be social while they work. The desire to “let loose” and connect with their peers is in full swing by the end of the year. Harness that!

You could run a divide and conquer group project where each student handles one part of the project and then pulls it together in the end or all students could work on each step of the project together. Both approaches allow students to lean on each other thereby reducing the perceived workload of the task.

This Project Template Google Slides resource is a perfect template for this type of approach. It can be adapted for any content area. Check out the link to see the preview and additional details about the resource.

Edit it to include your project goals, student options, rubric guidelines, project details and more. Create your student groups and set them to work! This resource even provides your students with the tools to develop their own presentation to showcase the learning they’ve done during the project!

Independent Research

Looking for a quieter, more solo approach? Let students do an independent research project.

What topic are you studying in your content area during this time of year? Dissect it. Identify topics that students can research further in order to share their findings with the class.

Book report, one pagers, biography, web quests, and more. There are so many ways that students can dig deeper into the topics we cover in the curriculum we use.

This is another great way to center student interest and student choice. Students can choose HOW to dig deeper into these topics. Tap into student self-motivation by letting them identify a topic THEY are interested in learning more about.

Community Interaction

Get students out and interacting with people from within their community. Students can interview family members, business owners, community leaders, etc.

This project could focus on learning more about the soft skills that adults have to utilize on a daily basis in order to live a successful life such as organization, perseverance and resilience, routines and habits, mental health strategies, and countless others.

While this would be a perfect project for Social Emotional Learning, College and Career Ready classes, it could also be used in any content area to show WHERE and HOW that content area appears in the real world and WHY the learning is relevant.

This Interviewing a Woman resource is an example of how simple it can be for students to connect with real-life human beings! The resource provides a template for instructions, examples, learning targets, student presentation slides and more!

It too focuses on centering the life experience of the individual being interviewed. It is a great way to draw students’ attention to the very real skills needed to live in this world. It also provides the community member an opportunity to impart wisdom on our students.

Writing Portfolio

Want to incorporate work students have already been doing? Writing is another way to showcase student learning.

There are several ways students could use their writing, journals, poems, essays, etc., to create a writing portfolio of their work.

If writing is something you do throughout the year, students could compile that writing into a portfolio. They could pick their favorite pieces of work, their work with the highest scores, or a chronological selection (one from each month) of their work.

If you don’t do a lot of writing throughout the year, no worries! I would suggest approaching journaling as a year-end project. This All About Me Journal Set is one of many resources that would work well for this.

These sets include numerous writing prompts that make it easy for students to find motivation and interest in writing. This particular set focuses allows students to draw upon their own thoughts and real-life experiences. With tools for supporting language learners and struggling writers, it is a resource that has built in supports.

All of the journal sets I have can be printed or used digitally and include teacher Google Slides and student models that make using this resource simple and efficient.

Note: if you choose to incorporate journaling throughout the year, telling students at the beginning of the year that they will use these daily or weekly journals as part of a year-end portfolio will aid in supporting the WHY and motivation for this activity.

Sharing their Learning

The best, likely most impactful, part of using student projects is providing students with the space to SHARE THEIR LEARNING. This can be done in a myriad of ways.

Students can organize their project into Google Slides that can be shared digitally or presented to the class.

Students could create posters or one-pagers to showcase the most important details of their learning. These posters and one-pagers can then be displayed around the room and used in a Gallery Walk. A gallery walk activity allows students to view peer work, provide feedback on peer work and/or present their work in a less formal way.

If formality is what you’re looking for, a Meet the Author/Peer Review approach to sharing learning would work really well. Students take turns presenting their work like an author would at a book signing. This might seem complicated, but it can be quite easy to facilitate. Check out the blog, “Celebrating Student Work | Meet the Author & Peer Review.” The beautiful thing about this approach is that both the author and the peer review practice communication and collaboration skills in the process of presenting/viewing the work.

If you’re worried about differentiation or varying student ability levels, check out this screenshot from my “Celebrating Student Work” blog. These are easy ways to support the numerous student needs in our classrooms.

In closing

The end of the school year is the perfect time for student projects that allow for flexibility and showcasing learning. All of the examples above have the added bonus of centering student voice in the process!

Most of the resources I create in my Teachers Pay Teachers storefront can be used for showcasing and facilitating student learning. Rife with student supports, teacher tools, and flexible templates, they make teaching simple.

That’s my overall goal: reduce teacher and student stress with resources that are supportive and easy to use while providing a basis for deep and meaningful learning.

Additional project resources are linked in the gallery below. Hope this helps. 🖤