by Anna Gratz Cockerille

In classrooms across the country, a sense of celebration is building. The feelings of joy and pride that come at the culmination of an entire year of daily hard work and dedication are unmistakable. This is is a time for a slight loosening of the reins, a time to reflect upon how far you and your students have come. It’s a time to enjoy the ease of routines you worked so hard to put into place, to watch students putting into practice the skills you’ve helped them to hone over and over. 

To be sure, along with this spirit of celebration comes the sense that the work is done. Many students seem to move into summer mode weeks (or months) before the summer is actually upon them. As teachers, our job, then, is to infuse the spirit of celebration with a sense of purpose, a sense that there is work left to be done in order for each student to truly become the best selves they are capable of being before the year ends. 

One way to keep students working with purpose until the very end of the school year while also maintaining the joy that comes with this time of year is to focus them on a culminating celebration, perhaps one that combines both reading and writing. A culminating celebration should be a grand affair, one that feels different from other celebrations held throughout the year. School-wide celebrations are exciting for all and are not as difficult to organize as one might imagine. Here are a few examples: 

• Hold a school-wide small group share session. Place students into small groups with approximately one student per grade. Invite each student to read a piece of writing (or a snippet from a larger piece). Ask students to give each other compliments based on all they have learned during the year about good writing. One of the older students can record a few of the compliments for each writer to have as a keepsake. 
• Create a school-wide gallery walk. Ask each student to prepare a snapshot of some of their greatest learning this year, perhaps by choosing a few of their best writing samples, or their best writing about their reading, or some images they create based on their favorite books. Have them organize a display on their desks to showcase their learning. Invite classes to tour each other’s rooms and to leave compliments on each others’ displays as they go. 
• Host a school-wide open-mike afternoon. Open up the mike for brave students who choose to read snippets of their writing or to share some of their best thinking from their reading. Teachers are welcome to join as well!
• Create a school-wide living poem. Ask each student in the school to choose their favorite line from their writing (or their favorite line from a book they read this year). Lead students in saying their lines, one after the other, during a whole-school assembly. 

Getting ready for any of these celebrations would require the kind of reflection, focus, and preparation that will keep students engaged right up to the end of the school year. 

At this week’s Twitter Chat, Reading and Writing Project Staff Developer Meghan Hargrave will lead a chat on ways to make sure the last months of the school year have big payoff. Join her and the TCRWP community to share ways to finish out the year with a sense of accomplishment and joy, while still keeping engagement and learning high. 

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Each Wednesday night at 7:30pm eastern, The Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project hosts a Twitter chat using the hashtag #TCRWP. This week join @mmhargrave to chat about ending the school year strong.

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Not on Twitter? Take Heinemann’s free Twitter for Educators course here.

Anna Gratz Cockerille, Coauthor of Bringing History to Life (Grade 4) in the Units of Study for Teaching Writing Series.

Anna was a teacher and a literacy coach in New York City and in Sydney, Australia, and later became a Staff Developer and Writer at TCRWP. She served as an adjunct instructor in the Literacy Specialist Program at Teachers College, and taught at several TCRWP institutes, including the content literacy institute, where she helped participants bring strong literacy instruction into social studies classrooms. Anna also has been a researcher for Lucy Calkins, contributing especially to Pathways to the Common Core: Accelerating Achievement (Heinemann 2012), and Navigating Nonfiction in the Units of Study for Teaching Reading, Grades 3–5 series (Heinemann 2010). Most recently, Anna served as an editor for the Units of Study for Teaching Reading, K–5 series.