Creative end of the school year ideas for middle school students

I don’t know about you, but this has been the hardest school year of my entire 22 year teaching career. I am so looking forward to teaching my May lessons and getting a much needed respite for the summer. I’m going to need it in order to muster up the courage to come back next fall. On a more positive note, here are some English lessons that I like to end the school year with in my 7th grade core class:

Cyrano - We love reading this play as a class. Bonus, it matches with our medieval world history standards and checks off the box for standard CCSS 7.5 for reading a play/poem. Check, check. Here is a blog post about it if you are interested in reading it with your class. We also bought some props like plastic swords and big rimmed hats with feathers for the students to use when they are acting. We also like to watch the French version of the film after reading each act. They love it! We are curious to see how the new movie is and if we’ll switch to it in the future.

Stamped - This is our first year teaching this book, so we’ll give you an update on how it goes soon, but we hope that our students respond well. We’re only reading half of the book and then our 8th grade teachers will teach the other half at the beginning of the school year. Katy created a free unit for teachers to use. Be sure to check out her blog post here.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty - We love reading this short story with our class and then watching the Ben Stiller adaption of the story. Walter Mitty is Ben Stiller’s masterpiece. We didn’t make this unit, but here is the one we use from Teachers Pay Teachers.

For some more ideas, check out this blog post.