Are you looking for fun new year activities for high school students? Try some of my favorite activities for the new year with your ELA students! Check out some of the ways I engage my students and keep them learning about both themselves and others, as well as reflecting on their hopes and dreams beyond the ball drop on new year’s eve.
The beginning of a new year is always a great time to hit the refresh button AND help students pause to reflect. Many of us are actually on a block schedule and are not only celebrating the new year, but you’re also getting a brand new group of students. I love to take the opportunity of a new year to set goals, think back on the past year, and make plans to have a great upcoming year!
Here are my top 4 fun new year activities for high school students!
Show students how to create a vision board!
Looking for a fun activity for students to ring in the new year? Creating a vision board is a great way for students to set goals, gain inspiration, and prepare to have a great year!
Did you know that visualization is one of the most powerful ways (besides hard work and resilience) to reach your goals? Olympic athletes have actually been using this concept for years. In fact, Psychology Today recently reported that the brain patterns that are activated when a person lifts heavy weights are incredibly similar to the brain waves created when the person just imagines lifting the weight! Isn’t that incredible? Creating a vision board is a great way to have a daily reminder of your goals, and the progress you’re making toward those goals.
Tell students that a vision board is simply a collection of images and words that represent your goals and where you want to “go” in life. Think of it as a collage of dreams, wishes, goals, etc. Once you’ve created your vision board, you should display it in a prominent place so that you are reminded of the “why” behind what you do every day. You should also consider adding things to your vision board that motivates or inspires you.
I like to have my students use Google Slides or Canva.com to create digital vision boards. This way, they can screenshot them and set them as the wallpaper on their phone, or even revise them during the year! Of course, you could always use magazines or print out photos to make a hard-copy vision board. Either way, a vision board is a powerful tool for setting goals and a great new year activity for students!
Start a new year reflection journal!
Start the near year out right! Encourage students to reflect on what they’ve learned in the past year, and the goals they want to accomplish in the upcoming year. I like to have my students reflect on things from the past year that taught them something or pieces of their hopes/dreams that they would like to build this year. I’ve found that some of the best ways to have students think reflectively about their upcoming year is by providing prompts such as:
- What is a new skill that you would like to learn and/or master this year?
- Who is the person that taught you the most this past year?
- Which experience are you most grateful for that happened this past year?
You can also find some fun prompts on Pinterest, too!
By having students create a reflection journal, they have a piece of the history of their lives that they can look back on and use to accomplish measurable goals!
Encourage students to build relationships in the New Year by using an Enneagram quiz!
The Enneagram is such an interesting, relevant topic and a great way to do an all about me activity. I love to have my students do a personality test so that I can find out more about them and they can learn about themselves! Currently, the Enneagram Personality Test has been flooding Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok! Why not have students learn while employing some modern, engaging material to keep them focused!?
I love using the New Year as a time for students to not only reflect on their own personalities, but the ways in which they relate to others. The Enneagram quiz is a fun way to have students learn about what makes them tick and how they can build stronger friendships throughout the new year.
Some of my favorite articles for students about the Enneagram can be found here:
- “The Enneagram is having a moment and you can thank millennials.”
- “The Enneagram at Work”
- “What is the Enneagram?”
Show students how to build resilience in the new year!
This has been a difficult season for many of us – let’s start the New Year off right by learning how resilience helps us, and how we can build it. Social-emotional learning is a crucial component of teaching our students. Sometimes, we have to explicitly teach our students how to overcome hardships and build resiliency.
I like to talk with my students about what resilience is and the ways in which they displayed it throughout the previous year. I also like to show them stories of resilience in others. This is a great way to build a classroom community and to offer a series of “what-if” situations to students where they would have to practice building resilience.
Here are some great articles to share with your students about resilience building:
- 5 Science-Backed Strategies to Build Resilience
- What is Resilience? Your Guide to Facing Life’s Challenges, Adversities, and Crises
- Psychology Today’s Guide to Resilience
Celebrating the New Year is such a fun time to feel refreshed and creatively reflect on the past year. I love to have my students use the opportunity to build and achieve goals, as well as be appreciative for all that they have.
What are some of the ways that you like to enjoy the new year with your own students? I’d love to hear about all of the fun things that you’re doing in your own classrooms!
For idea beyond fun new year activities for high school students, you can check out my other posts here!
