6 Exciting End of the Year ELA Activities

Let’s be honest: by the time May or June rolls around, the classroom vibe is… interesting. Right about now, you’re looking for exciting end-of-year activities to keep your students engaged. Students are half-packed for summer, your to-do list could wrap around the school, and the energy? Let’s just say it’s somewhere between chaotic and caffeine-fueled. Here’s the good news: you can keep students engaged, learning, and (dare we say) smiling with some creative, end-of-year ELA activities.

ELA Activities for the End of the Year

1.The Last Line Writing Challenge

Give students the final line of a story, and let them build the rest. Whether it’s mysterious (“And then, everything went dark”) or sentimental (“She finally understood what home meant”), this activity lets students flex their creative writing muscles while sneaking in plot structure and figurative language. Bonus: display their stories in a “Gallery of Goodbyes” wall.

2. Book Tastings: Summer Edition

Transform your room into a café, beach shack, or even a Camp Read-a-Lot. Set up stations with popular middle grade or YA books and let students “taste” the first few pages. Have them rate the books and create a summer reading wishlist. This is a great way to build buy-in for summer reading without assigning a novel. The best part? Your students now have the book they need to read over the summer (A two-for-one deal)!

3. ELA Mystery Games

Students love to solve riddles, decode clues, and read between the lines to crack a classroom mystery. Whether it’s “Who Stole the Plant Truck?” or “Who Stole the Basketball Uniforms?”, these games reinforce key reading skills like inference, theme, and main idea, reading comprehension, grammar, literary terms, and feel like play.

4. Literary Lip Sync Battle

Assign students a favorite character or author and let them lip sync or dramatically perform a monologue, poem, or key scene. This is perfect for theater-loving students and helps with tone, expression, and public speaking confidence. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen someone channel Shakespeare while wearing sunglasses.

5. The Great End of the Year One-Pager Project

First, give students a blank sheet and challenge them to summarize their favorite book, poem, or short story from the year using doodles, quotes, symbols, and key takeaways. This One-Pager Activity includes everything you need to help students reflect on their academic and personal growth through a guided one-pager assignment. With multiple one-pager templates, teacher instructions, student-friendly prompts, and a bright bulletin board title (“A Sun-Sational Year”), this is a must-have for your end-of-year classroom celebrations! It’s part art project, part ELA review—and perfect for hallway displays.

6. Literary Analysis Scavenger Hunt

Hide figurative language examples around the room, in a text, take it outside, and give students a checklist: simile, metaphor, hyperbole, pun, onomatopoeia… They hunt, they decode, and they compete. (And maybe even sweat a little—yes, learning can happen outside!)

FREE End of the Year ELA Digital Word Search

Have your students search for common terms they learned throughout the year, like personification, simile, metaphor, and other common ELA terms. This word search is on a digital platform, and it is an engaging activity to help contain the end-of-year energy!

Grab it HERE!

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End-of-year doesn’t have to mean end-of-engagement. These activities keep skills sharp while celebrating everything you and your students have accomplished. YOU made it through, and that deserves a standing ovation, an iced coffee, and maybe a summer nap.

Now go forth and finish strong; you’ve got this!