Final Day Activities
It’s the last day of the semester, you’re exhausted, looking forward to a much needed vacation, and wondering what to do with your students for the very last class. Sound familiar? No worries, we’ve got you covered. Here are some final day activities for you ESL classes that will have your students leaving your classroom with a warm, fuzzy glow, thinking you are the best teacher ever. But before we start, if you haven’t already done a review, you may also be interested in our ‘Top 5 Review Activities for Adult ESL Classes’. Now, without any further ado, let’s begin.
What’s in Your Future?
The final class of a course, semester or even year is a great time to look to the future. More specifically, for your student to talk about their future. You can approach this activity in different ways, and suggest different language depending on the ability level of your students. One way is to have students in a group ask each other questions about their future plans. If you have beginner level students who haven’t practiced using ‘going to’ to talk about future plans, you could suggest using ‘want to / hope to / would like to‘ to talk about their future ambitions.
An alternative for intermediate level students, is to ask them to make predictions about other students in the group/class. For more advanced level classes, you could get them using more advanced tenses by prompting them with a future date and a suitable example. For example: ‘By 2040 Mr/Ms Teacher will have retired.’ or ‘In 2030 John will be managing his own company’.
Teach the Teacher
Having spent the whole semester only allowing English to be spoken in your class, it can be a nice gesture to take an interest in the languages of your students. Put students in groups and tell them to choose one word or phrase that they think will be very useful for you to learn if you go to their country (if you are not already living in their country). It could be slang, but no swear words are allowed. Give them 10 minutes to prepare, then they will come to the front of the class to teach you. Have them write the word or phrase on the board, and explain the meaning and possible situational uses in English.
This activity is fairly straightforward if all of your students are the same nationality. If you have a mixed nationality class, however, you have a few more options. One option is to group students by nationality if you happen to have an equal amount of students from different countries. A second option, is to have each student in a group make a suggestion, then the group chooses the best one. A third option, is to have each group present 3 or 4 words or phrases; one for each student/nationality in the group.
Thank You Notes
Thank you notes are a nice way to have students reflect on their time in your class. I start by reading out my own note thanking the students for being such a great class. Then I ask the class to choose either one student in the class, a group they were a part of, or myself (the teacher) and write a thank you note to them. If you can spare the expense, it is well worth having a having a variety of coloured sticky notes for your students to choose from on which they can write their thank you notes.
Once students have finished writing their notes, they deliver them to the intended recipient. Depending how many notes you receive, you can either choose a few to read aloud to the class, or read all of them. Alternatively, with higher level students, you could have them read their own notes as they present them.
This activity is easy to adapt to online or hybrid classes by using Padlet.com. Be sure to register in advance and have a way to share the link with your students. Then you just need to write your own note as an example to share with the class.
How Well Do You Know Your Teacher?
You’ve spent the whole semester with your students, so they should know you pretty well, right? Whether you are reserved about your private life and only occasionally give away information as examples to language points, or chat away without reservation; find out how much your students have been paying attention to all these detains about their teacher.
There are two ways to approach this activity: a pub quiz or an auction. Both work well, but if you suspect your students won’t remember many details about you, perhaps because you only see them once a week, then the auction will be a better choice.
For the pub quiz, prepare 10 (or more) questions about yourself. Try and choose things that you remember telling your students. Get students in groups, ask your questions, and have one group member write their group’s answers down. Collect all groups answers, go through the questions and answers with the class, and find out which team got the most points.
A fun alternative to the pub quiz is an auction. It works in a similar way to our ‘Sentence Auction’ review activity. For this activity you should write 12 sentences about yourself; 7 should be true, and 5 should be false. Each group has $1000 to bid for each fact about the teacher. Go through each fact one by one; write it on the board, then start the students bidding on the sentences. Make a note of which group one the bidding for each sentence. Once all the sentences have been bought, go through each one, marking then True or False, and awarding points for each true sentence. The team with the most points wins the auction.
If You’re in the Neighbourhood
Finally, onto our last suggestion for final day activities for your ESL classes. By the end of semester, students who have been studying abroad are no doubt are thinking about returning home. Let’s get students to think about their home region from the point of a visitor or tourist instead.
Tell students you are planning to travel next vacation, and you are considering visiting their home countries. If you were to visit their region, what do they recommend you to do. Which places should you visit? Ask them to explain their recommendations by telling you what makes them special or unique. You can expand this task by asking for suggestions for food or drinks to try, possible souvenirs to buy and so on.
Our Suggestions for Final Day Activities
Those were our suggestions for final day activities for your ESL (EFL) classes. If you try any of these suggestions with your classes, let us know how they went in the comments below. Also, if we missed any of your favourite final day activities, let us know that too.
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More Final Day Activities
Did we miss any of your favourite final day activities? Let us know what they are, and share them with other teachers by leaving a comment below.