Looking for some easy end of year art activities? As the school year winds down, it’s always nice to have a few low-prep, low-mess and relaxing art activities in your back pocket. With school assemblies, shortened days and tired kids (and teachers!), open-ended and calming art projects can help the final days of school feel creative, meaningful and less chaotic.
Keep reading for 16 easy end of year art activities!
Artist Trading Cards
What are Artist Trading Cards? ATCs are miniature works of art that are 2.5″ x 3.5″. They are made to be collected and traded. You can make them with any theme or material you’d like. Anything goes! Kids love to create miniature works of art. Some of my students like to make cards that are inspired by the card games Pokemon or Magic, characters with special abilities and powers.
The ATCs in these two pictures are ones that I recently made.
I used to regularly swap and collect ATCs. Here are some examples from my Artist Trading Card collection!
Here is an easy doodled ATC tutorial if you don’t know where to start.
I have some Artist Trading Card templates here and some All About Me templates here. If you’d like to buy pre-made blank cards, the Apostrophe brand (Amazon Affiliate links are used in this post) is my favorite. I have tested MANY of the blank ATC brands on Amazon and these are my favorite for most media. Some of the other brands are really bad and smear terribly. Sharpies and collage work best on the cards.
You can also make ATCs just by cutting cardstock paper down to 2.5″ x 3.5″, but I feel like that can be tedious. Another option is to draw out a sheet of artist trading cards (either with a ruler or by tracing an existing card), photocopy on to cardstock and have the students cut out their own cards.
Kids also like drawing on blank index cards, so that is another option for miniature artworks.
Mini Sketchbooks for an End of the Year Art Class
Miniature art is so much fun! Just like artist trading cards, mini sketchbooks are especially appealing to kids. My students loved making them and many even asked for extra books to take home and continue filling with drawings.
I saw this idea shared in a Facebook group, and the theme in the post was “Things That Bring Me Joy.” The pages were filled with drawings of things that make the artist happy. I wish I could remember which teacher originally shared the idea… if it was you, please let me know so I can give proper credit!
I gave this theme suggestion to my students, but they had freedom to make pages with any theme they wanted. Here is the box of 50 mini sketchbooks on Amazon. The pages are pretty thin and markers bled through to the other side. But you could use crayons or colored pencils.
End of Year Art Memory Books & Zines
Just like mini sketchbooks, mini foldable books are also a huge hit with kids! Accordion books and zines are fun, flexible and interactive art projects that give students lots of creative freedom.
I just finished writing a comprehensive beginner’s guide to zines! Check out the blog post if you’d like to learn more about what zines are, different ways to make them, and ideas for using them in the classroom.
If you’re looking for a quick print-and-go activity, you might also like the Memory Book templates I created. They include easy accordion book and zine-style activities that are simple to prep and fun for students.
End of the Year Coloring Banners
One fun end of year collaborative project is a coloring banner. You can draw out the design on a large piece of bulletin board paper and then have your students color them in. Kwik Stix are a “quick” and easy way to color in large areas. Here are a few more examples of positive word banners. The great thing about these positive banners is that you can roll them up and save them for next year to hang on the empty bulletin boards at the start of the year!
Ideas for Phrases
- Welcome Back!
- Creativity Starts Here
- Color Your World
- Make Your Mark
- A Great Year Starts Here
- Dream Big
- Ready to Learn, Ready to Grow
- Make This Year Amazing
- Believe You Can
Easy End of the Year Art Centers
Art centers are always a favorite with kids, and they’re relatively easy to pull out during those busy end-of-year days.
If you don’t already have many center activities, summer garage sales can be a great place to look for inexpensive materials like building toys, blocks, puzzles and other hands-on creative supplies.
Here are some of my students’ favorite art centers
- Pipe cleaners and pony beads
- Shape punchers
- Lego bricks
- Building toys like wooden blocks, magnetic tiles, magnetic blocks
- Texture plate rubbings
- Washi tape or stickers
- Origami
I have compiled 43 different art center ideas in these Art Center Signs. Even if you don’t want the signs, if you click through to the listing and look at the preview, you can see the list of all the center ideas.
Washi Tape Designs
This blog post explains what I mean by using washi tape.
Basically what we did was peel and stick different washi tape designs. Then, we used Kwik Stix to color in the sections. Some of the students enjoyed peeling the tape off and others left it.
If you are going to peel it off, you need to place it a few times on your pants to get it a little fuzzy and less sticky, so it doesn’t tear the paper.
Sidewalk Chalk Creations
Drawing with sidewalk chalk is a classic end of year art activity. Here are a few ideas:
- Choose a theme for your students to draw or leave it open-ended.
- Write positive messages.
- Create hopscotch style games and pathways for kids to walk and travel on.
- Create a giant chalk town – add houses, cars, roads, shops and more.
- Write farewell messages and thank you notes to teachers.
- Draw a mandala.
- Make a summer themed chalk mural.
- Create a drawing with one long continuous line.
Art Game – Pass the Page Doodles
How this works: The goal is to fill a piece of paper with a page of doodles in one theme.
Each student has their own piece of paper. They choose the theme for their paper. Write that theme on the top of the paper or the back of the paper.
They start the drawing with something in that theme. Then they pass it to the person next to them. That person adds something to the page of doodles, keeping the same theme going. Keep passing around the room until everyone’s page is filled up!
Theme Ideas: weird monsters, summer things, cats, tiny foods, silly faces
Outdoor Observational Drawing
Go outside with a clipboard, pencil and coloring materials. Here are some ideas for what to draw:
- Give students a nature scavenger hunt and then they can draw the items they find.
- Draw the playground.
- Draw the clouds or a landscape scene of what they see.
- Draw the school building and then turn it into: a castle, a spaceship, an underwater school, or a monster headquarters!
- Or, you can just sit outside and draw whatever you like. Sometimes a change in scenery can be a great way to jumpstart creativity.
Bookmarks
Design a bookmark on a blank card. My students LOVED these. The tassels make them extra fun.
Free Growth Mindset bookmarks!
Of course, precut bookmarks from cardstock will also work! Hole punch and attach some ribbon.
Art with Nature
Go outside and gather up some natural materials such as leaves, grass, sticks and wildflowers. Create art on the ground using the natural materials you found.
Another option is to glue these materials to a piece of paper. Add drawings and additional details using paint or other art supplies.
Here are some ideas in an old blog post with three art examples that involve drawing leaves, ink spraying leaves and collages with leaves.
Paper Hats with Scraps
Use up the paper scraps leftover from the year’s projects!
Cut a wide strip of construction paper that is long enough to go around a child’s head. Use different paper manipulation methods to create a fun paper sculpture hat. Glue these to the band.
When finished, adjust the band to fit a child’s head and then staple it together! If you need some ideas for paper techniques, I have an example of a paper techniques on a poster here!
Recycled Art Sculpture
Here’s another highly engaging art project for kids: building recycled art sculptures, either independently or in groups.
This activity can be a great way to use up your recycled donations such as paper towel tubes, popsicle sticks, corks, wooden scraps, egg cartons, bottle caps, and any other found materials you have available.
For these sculptures, we glued the pieces together first and let them dry. Once dry, the students painted them and added embellishments such as sequins, feathers and other decorative details.
I’ve found that kids love building and everyone loves this open-ended activity.
Shrinky Dinks
If you haven’t tried shrinky dinks, these are always a crowd-pleaser! This is also a great project for summer camps. I’ve found that coloring with paint markers looks really nice, but you can use other drawing materials like colored pencils. I bake these in my oven at home. Follow the manufacturers’ directions carefully and never let a student operate any sort of oven.
A tip for baking: the natural baking process involves them curling up. When they are curling, leave them in longer. They should uncurl on their own and then you know they are ready. If they are slightly stuck, I use a metal butter knife to pull them apart and press them down to flatten them.
Summer Bucket List
Looking for an easy end of year activity that you can just print and hand your students? Have your students create and draw their own summer bucket lists!
Students can fill the bucket with drawings of things they want to do over the summer.
This FREE download includes both a blank version and a prompted version. A beach ball outline is also included, which students can color, design however they’d like or fill with even more summer-themed drawings.
Wave Goodbye to Kindergarten!
This is one of my favorite end of year projects for Kindergarten. I do it almost every year.
On the first day, create a page of fingerprints.
To do this, dip ONE finger into a cup of water. Then, rub your finger around in a watercolor pan. Make fingerprints across the page.
After the fingerprints have dried, trace your hand on construction paper and cut it out. Glue it to your paper.
Cut out the printed poem and glue that down!
The poem and full tutorial is available at this Kindergarten Wave Goodbye blog post.
I hope this has given you some good ideas for the end of the year in art class!
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