End of the Year ELA Activities: Fun Independent Projects for High School English

It’s the end of the school year—how can you possibly get your ELA students excited about learning when summer vacation beckons?

If you’ve spent any time around teens, you know the ticket to success in their learning is giving them as much choice as you can.  When they choose what they will learn and the stories they will tell, they feel empowered and engaged.  And they know that you care about their interests. 

But you also need to have some modicum of, well, control in the classroom.  Just telling kids, “Do what you want, I’m done with you all!” doesn’t do much to impress the random admin who decides to do a last-minute walk-through, and honestly doesn’t do much to maintain the peace for the last few days.  

And the final requirement for lesson plans that can survive the gauntlet of the end of the school year is that they must be highly interruptible—they need to work around the last-minute graduation setup, the meetings to talk about how that one student can pass for the year, or the time you have to spend searching for alarm clocks left in lockers by the senior prank. 

But if you can figure out the right balance of freedom and control, choice and rigor, engaging projects and simple directions, and lesson plans that stand up to constant interruptions,  you just might make it through.  

Here are my top five choices for thriving (not just surviving) through the end of the school year.

If you want ready-to-use materials for these ideas, I’ve put all of these units together in my End-of-the-Year ELA Bundle.

1. Independent Reading and Reading Responses.  

Getting your classes to work on independent reading in a reading workshop format is a great option for the last few weeks of school. Students are often inundated with overly stimulating parties and flashy movies at this time of year.  A chance to quietly read a book of their choosing makes for a great break from the craziness.  

But rather than just tossing a book at them and saying, “Please, I beg you, go read!” I suggest giving them some structure and accountability.  After years of trying different methods, I have found that a quick page number check at the beginning and end of the class period goes a long way toward getting students to actually read.  And when you pair that with regular reading responses with enough scaffolding that students are grappling with the text and don’t see the responses as busywork, you might just pull off a class of quiet, calm teens engrossed in books. Ready to double down on reading workshop? You can read more about my best tips for reading workshop in this post.

2. Writing Workshop with a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Bent.  

At this point in the school year, you have likely worked through multiple writing assignments with your classes.  So this time, give them the chance to come back to their favorite genre and give it another shot—or to try something completely new!  You might have students working on research essays, poetry, narrative, or argument essays all at the same time (or poems based on research, argument essays opening with personal anecdotes, you get the idea…).  

If you haven’t done writing workshop yet, you’ll want to spend some time establishing the routines and expectations (and let’s be honest, even if you did writing workshop a month ago, you’ll still need to review some elements).  Spending a few days going over how to write first drafts, giving students concrete ideas for revising their drafts, modeling peer conferences—and most importantly, giving them lots of class time to just write—will help you all get through the end of the year in one piece. 

3. Contemporary Poetry Unit and Anthology Project.  

Since contemporary poets deal with subject matter that really matters today, even your students who claim to hate poetry will find something to engage them.  I also really like to explore poetry through video at this time of year—it might feel passive, but poetry performances can be incredibly powerful and compelling, just what you need to wake up those sleepy students in the last few days of class.  Some of my favorite poets to save for the end of the year include Rudy Fransisco, Sarah Kay, Brian Turner, Emtithal Mahmoud, and Nikki Giovanni.

After discussing and analyzing poetry as a class, I like to have students create a poetry anthology to present to the class.  Getting students to teach themselves—and each other—is surprisingly effective at this point in the year.  You can read more about how I teach my contemporary poetry unit in this blog post.

4. Dystopian Fiction and Write-Your-Own Dystopian Story.  

With its creativity and imagination, dystopian fiction is a great choice for the end of the year.  Teens love to dive into new worlds, and tapping into that natural interest helps to engage them when they would rather be planning their summer vacation video game marathons.  My favorite dystopian short stories include “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin, “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut, and “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. Another element which I find especially helpful at the end of the year is to connect these stories to real-life issues like scapegoating, how to have healthy conflict, and real-life heroes who are standing up to injustice in their worlds.

After reading and discussing those stories, I like to have students write their own dystopian fiction about issues that matter to them.  (Again we’re moving into a writing workshop to end the year.) This can be a really meaningful way to send them off to their next year of learning feeling inspired and empowered. 

5. Slam Poetry Exploration, Writing Workshop, and Performances.  

Think you’ve gotten to know your students this year?  Well, prepare to connect with them on an even deeper level!  Teaching a slam poetry unit is great at the end of the year because students are more comfortable with you and with their classmates, and are therefore more likely to get vulnerable and real when they write their own slam poems and perform them for one another. 

This unit is very similar to the contemporary poetry unit—and in fact includes some of the same fabulous poets with a deep dive into the work of Emtithal Mahmoud, Sudanese-American poet and activist, who won the 2015 Individual World Poetry Slam championship. But in this unit, students are focusing less on analysis and more on working towards their own spoken word poetry and performances.  It might sound like a high bar for the end of the year, but with enough scaffolding and structured pre-writing activities, you’ll be surprised at the fire bars your students will be spitting—or, you know, whatever hip phrase the youth are using these days.

Final Notes.

Different units might work better with different classes—for example, in an AP class that has been working diligently all year on literary analysis, I would probably take the time at the end of the year for more personal writing. I have also found it effective to mix and match—so we might do reading workshop twice a week, writing workshop three times a week, etc.

As you read through these options for engaging students at the end of the year, you might notice a trend: lots and lots of workshops.  What I love about ending the school year this way is that rather than the traditional round of movies and parties, workshops allow students’ individual interests to shine.  It’s such a great feeling when you are surrounded by that happy buzz of teens working away on their own passions and projects.   

And even more importantly, workshops allow you to relate to your students on a level that you are often unable to achieve when the whole class is working together.  Just a few minutes spent in conversations and conferences makes a huge difference in those students’ progress and in your relationship with them—a great payoff at a time of year when even the most dedicated teachers are ready to check out. 

And what better way to end the year than by connecting with your students?

If you like the structure of these ideas but don’t want to build all of the scaffolding, workshop materials, and pacing yourself in May, I’ve bundled my best end-of-the-year resources together here.