Year in Review Student Reflection

Year in Review (1)

I truly cannot believe the school year is almost over! I personally love to take time to reflect at the end of each school year (here is the template I use to help me reflect on my year) and I believe we should provide opportunities for our students to reflect at the close of each year, as well.

I created a template and asked my 2nd-grade daughter to fill it in:

Year in Review Slide Deck

How cool would this be to do with your whole class and have on loop at an end of year party with parents???!!! SO COOL!!!

My daughter loved the prompts and loved changing all of the colors from black to purple – her current favorite color. But, by far, her favorite part (and the reason I think she stayed so engaged with zero prompting from me) was the cutout image of herself that I dropped in prior to handing her the computer and asking her to answer the prompts.

Creating and Inserting the Transparent Background Photo

I used my phone to take a head-to-toe picture of my daughter, then, still using my phone, I went to the website remove.bg and with one click, the site removed the background for me! To get the picture off of my phone and into the slide deck, I simply tapped on the share button in the photos app on my phone and chose to share it to Google Drive (you need to install the free Google Drive app for this to work).

Then, I went to the slide deck and selected:

  • Insert
  • Image
  • From Drive
  • and chose the image which popped up at the top because it was my most recent added image

Depending on the age of your students, I think you could assign students to take pictures of each other and even upload them to drive.

Check out the example Slide Deck

Click here to make a copy of the slide deck to edit

Making the examples your own

I created generic questions for my examples, however, depending on your grade level and subject matter, I encourage you to customize one of the example slides with your reflective questions or sentence starters.

You can edit any of the Word Art graphics (the words that are outlines with white filling) so that they say your grade level or your text. To edit Word Art:

  • double click the Word Art
  • edit the text in the popup, and
  • hit enter to see the text update.

You can change the color on all of the Word Art by selecting the word (or multiple Word Art graphics by holding down shift), then changing the line color, or even the fill color. To change the size of Word Art, simply grab a corner and size up or down as you would with a picture or graphic.

Getting the Slide Deck to Students

Once you’ve edited one slide to reflect your grade level, subject area, and reflective questions, you have several options for how to share with students. You can either:

  • Copy and paste your edited slide over and over so that there are enough in one slide deck for every student in your class and share the one slide deck so that each student has one slide in the deck. I love this idea for showcasing the slide deck at an end of year party or sending out for all parents to see, OR
  • Keep only one slide in the deck and share a copy of the deck so each student has their own separate file, OR
  • Choose to edit the very last slide in the deck of examples and print one for each student and physically cut out and paste a picture of the student rather than doing it digitally.

 

I hope you are able to adapt this template to help students reflect on their year with you and/or to showcase students to parents at end of year parties. Have a great end of the school year!

Published by Meredith Akers

18 thoughts on “Year in Review Student Reflection”

  1. Mrs. McAlister says:
    Reply

    Meredith, I love the template and my students love remove.bg. Could you add a sixth grade template for me? I’d like to send the slide deck to all of our teacher. I absolutely love your work!!!

    -Marilyn ♥️

    Liked by 1 person

  2. Pingback: Teacher Appreciation Week, Google Slides, PodcastEDU | Mr. Lee Teaches
  5. Debi says:
    Reply

    I love the website to remove the background! I am unsure how to add the picture back in though to the template because now the background is white.

    Like

  6. Dawn says:
    Reply

    Thank you so much for this adorable idea. Have you ever tried printing them out? I tried and the picture background was all black.

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  7. Steph says:
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    For some reason when I upload the pics to my drive they are coming with a white background which is showing up when I import them into the slides??? Thoughts?

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  9. Cheryl Gerbacio says:
    Reply

    I just did this for open house and it was a total hit! Thank you! Do you have an Instagram I can tag you in, as I’ll be posting a pic?

    Liked by 1 person

  10. Ms. Karveta says:
    Reply

    I am having trouble sharing it with my students that are in second grade. They do not have google emails yet. Can you help me?

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