6 Wrap up activities to close out your lessons

In this guide

• Exit cards
  • S-I-T exit cards
• Journal prompts
  • Dual-entry entries
  • Lifted-lines
  • Glossaries
• 3-2-1 Strategy
• Goal setting and self-assessment
  • For closing out lessons with group projects and activities
  • For specific subjects
  • Modify and maintain for self-awareness and growth
• Classroom audits
  • After group or classwide discussions
  • Reassessing classroom rules
  • Rose, Thorn, Bud
• Changing perspectives

Everyone needs closure sometimes–you, your students, and even lessons. Closure at the end of your lesson helps students emotionally and academically, plus it’s a great way to summarize what you just covered in class and establish goals (APS). Students can leave feeling accomplished and ready to tackle the rest of their day–and so can you!

Utilizing wrap-ups to close out your class can model the importance of setting time for reflection and hone metacognitive skills. They’re also invaluable assessment tools that can help you:

• Monitor students’ wellbeing in and out of the classroom.
• Gauge what aspect of the lesson or material is most relevant or interesting to students.
• Evaluate and review classroom rules.
• Help students review new material and information.
• Identify what students are struggling with.
• Give students a chance to express their opinions, feelings, and/or ask for support in a safe environment. 

1) Exit cards

Students will use flash cards or half-slips of paper to respond to a specific prompt or question. Exit cards are collected at the end of the class, so they’re a quick and effective way for students to review what they learned. They can be modified for any class and work well with the other wrap-ups listed here.

For you, exit cards are a great way to collect feedback on activities and class conduct, monitor students’ understanding, and consider questions and challenges they may face. They’re also an invaluable assessment tool that you can modify as needed.

For students, exit cards are a great way to review and reflect on what they learned. They’re also a safe and accessible way to assess any questions or concerns they’d prefer to share privately. 

The prompts should be brief, as students will need time to answer them and turn them in at the end of class. Consider prompts like:

• What was your favorite and least favorite moment of class? Why?
• Did the lesson/subject matter bring up any feelings, questions, or insight? If so, what are they?
• List three to five new things you learned in class today/ in a group discussion.

If students are learning a challenging or emotionally charged subject, exit cards can be used with the S-I-T Strategy. I’ve found this strategy to be especially helpful for students confronting challenging and sensitive concepts in history and social studies.

S-I-T exit cards

• After the lesson, ask students identify the following on their exit card:
  • One Surprising fact/idea/concept.
  • One Interesting fact/idea/concept.
  • One Troubling fact/idea/concept.

Exit cards can be more than wrap-ups if you hold onto them. They can be redistricted back to students at a future time to evaluate how their responses and questions may have changed since they first encountered the subject/material. Alternatively, they can be used as warm-ups to recall and evaluate prior knowledge in related topics or texts.

For additional prompt ideas and modifications, check out Facing History’s Exit Tickets.

2) Journal prompts

Journals let students examine multiple perspectives and make informed judgements about what they see, hear, and think. It’s a safe and creative way for them to explore their uncertainties and feelings and help students develop empathy.

Student journals help you “understand what your students know, what they are struggling to understand, and how their thinking has changed over time” (Living History).

It’s important to ensure students understand what kind of privacy and grading criteria they’ll face. You can choose a specific day of the week to collect and read them, have students select the pages they’re comfortable sharing, or ask them to fold or remove pages they want to keep private. You could even use a handout journal.

Students may be less likely to express themselves if they think there’s a right or wrong way to journal. Try grading on criteria like completion or creativity, or have students evaluate their own journals. 

You can find daily or weekly prompts to encourage student self-reflection here. You can invite students to brainstorm their own prompts as well. 

All of the following wrap-ups can be paired with journaling. While journaling itself can be a great way for students to ground themselves before moving on with the rest of their day, it can be utilized to review and reflect on what they just learned as well. 

Dual-entry entries

• Have students draw a line in the center of a page or fold it in half. One half will be what they learned in class, ex. the main ideas of a text or what happened in a historical event. The other half is where they’ll write down their reactions and feelings about the notes and what they learned.

Lifted-lines

• This is a great prompt for English Language Arts and Social Studies. Ask students to “lift a line” from a text or film they studied that stands out to them.
• Then, have students consider questions such as:
  • What ideas does the line make you think about?
  • Do you recognize any literary techniques in this line?
  • Why did this line speak to you? 
  • What questions does this line raise for you?

Glossaries

• This is a great way for students to track new vocabulary in their journals after the lesson. A glossary should be a designated section or in the back of their journal. 
• Students will record the definitions of any new words and/or concepts they encounter in each lesson. They can refer back to them in the future or add additional details as they discover them.
• Glossaries can be adapted to be more subject specific, such as a glossary of mathematical terms or functions. 

3) 3-2-1 Strategy

The 3-2-1 strategy can be utilized as a quick wrap-up to close lessons about new material and subject matter, especially in Social Studies, Languages Arts and Science. In addition, it can help you gauge classwide interest and understanding of a topic.

The 3-2-1 method asks students to respond to a lesson, text, art, or even film by listing three takeaways and main ideas, two questions, and one aspect they enjoyed (or fun fact).

1. List three things you learned today.
2. List two questions you still have.
3. List one aspect of the lesson or topic you enjoyed.

It’s easy to modify the time spent on this wrap-up by making the prompts more specific, such as:

• Write down three differences between two concepts you learned today, two similarities, and one question.
  • Ex. the difference between two geometric shapes/art or literary movements/branches of government.
• Write down the three main or important ideas from a film or text, two supporting statements for each one, and one question.

This strategy can be completed on a worksheet or paper, or even incorporated into the exit card  or journaling activities mentioned above. Collect their answers at the end of the class. Are there certain activities or concepts that captured the class’s interests? Is there anything they need to review again or struggle with?

You can hold onto the 3-2-1 responses and utilize them in a future wrap-up or even warm-up. Simply present the same prompts again to students at a future point or check out Project Zero’s 3-2-1 Bridge. Examining the changes in their answers can provide students with insight on their own learning process, and how their perception and understanding of subject matter can evolve.

4) Goal setting and self-assessment

There are some SEL activities that remain relevant from elementary to high school and beyond. Self-management and decision-making skills are two of them, and these wrap-ups can help students develop them. There are several ways your wrap-ups can tap into these skills.

For closing out lessons with group projects and activities

• Do you have any new insights about the book/project/discussion/subject because of a classmate’s comment or question?
• How can the group help you reach your goals? How can you help your group reach their goals?
• Is there anything specific you want to improve or accomplish in the next group project/discussion? If so, how would you do it?

For specific subjects

• What’s your reading/ writing/ creative goal for next week? List one thing you can do to help you meet your reading goal.
• Is there something in/with the subject matter that you’re struggling with specifically?  List one thing you can do to improve your understanding.

Modify and maintain for self-awareness and growth

• What helped me focus/participate/engage in class today that I should maintain?
• Is there something I could modify to improve my participation/engagement/focus in class?

Goals can be expansive or specific as your students need them to be–all of these activities can be modified to work within different time frames, whether their goals are a week or year away. These prompts are great additions to exit card and journaling wrap-ups as well.

For more inspiration, check out our resources on self-management for elementary grades and above. 

5) Classroom audits

Wrap-ups can be a great way to check-in with your students’ well-being and assess classroom challenges. They can give you extra insight into any struggles or difficulties they face in class, and they help you assess if any students need additional support.

After group or classwide discussions

• Was there anything distracting you during the discussion, such as background noise?
• Did you notice any students struggling to be heard? Did you feel that you weren’t heard at any point?
• What would improve class discussions for you?

Reassessing classroom rules

• Did the class/you uphold the class rules today? Why or why not?
• Where did we/you struggle? Where do you think we/you exceeded?
• List one thing you/the class could do differently to ensure we all uphold the class rules.

Rose, Thorn, Bud

Try out the Rose, Thorn, Bud method as a handout or exit ticket, and/or have students debrief in pairs to help each other with their thorns afterwards. This exercise is a great way to check-in on students’ well being and monitor where they may need additional support.

• The Rose: An achievement, no matter how small, that you experienced recently.
• The Thorn: A challenge or stressful situation you’ve recently experienced.
• The Bud: An event, opportunity, activity etc that you’re looking forward to.
• If students find the activity overwhelming, consider limiting the number of roses, thorns, and buds (ex. List only one of each).
•  Some students may be more comfortable turning the handout in at the end of class vs discussing in pairs and vice versa, so modify as you see fit.

These activities might expose new classroom and behavioral management issues. Need some tips, ideas, or inspiration? Explore the ways our educators tackle classroom management here.

6) Changing perspectives

This activity helps students assess how the lesson impacted their perceptions, beliefs, and opinions about the subject matter. It’s particularly useful if they were introduced to new information, had a class discussion or debate, or watched a film. Alternatively, it can be used to review a unit they’ve just finished instead.

Make sure students understand that they need to reflect on their own thinking and learning process, and how they evolved over time. Alternatively, students can reflect on their preconceptions about a topic or material they hadn’t yet studied and assess how and why those preconceptions changed when they studied it.

Display or have students begin with these sentence starts:

I used to think…

Now I think…

Students can share their responses in a group or paired discussion if time permits, or turn it in like an exit card at the end of class. It may be helpful to introduce this activity to the entire class or in groups first so students can ask questions about it and see it modeled.

If students are struggling with expressing themselves or figuring out where to start, try utilizing more detailed sentence starters for their prompt, such as:

Before I learned about / When I began learning about ____, I used to think.___.

After learning about ___, some of my initial thoughts changed. Now I think ___.

Still on the hunt for more warp-ups and class closing ideas? Check out ClickView’s resources on the Think-Pair-Share strategy or Kevin Toro’s journaling method for beginning and ending classes.

Additional information and sources

1. Harvard Graduate School of Education (2022). PZ’s Thinking Routines Toolbox | Project Zero. [online] pz.harvard.edu. Available at: https://pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines.
2. www.facinghistory.org. (2021). Routines for Getting Started and Wrapping Up | Facing History & Ourselves. [online] Available at: https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/routines-getting-started-wrapping [Accessed 16 Apr. 2024].
3. www.facinghistory.org. (n.d.). Journals in a Facing History Classroom | Facing History and Ourselves. [online] Available at: https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/journals-facing-history-classroom.