We know you want to make your yearbook senior pages a blow-it-out-of-the-water section.
After all, senior year is kind of a big deal, what with all those rites of passage, goals achieved, and challenges met. Capturing all the feelings associated with it can make your yearbook that much better.
The secret to a truly awesome senior section is finding the right coverage angle for the right emotion. And, luckily for you, there are about as many angles as there are emotions. You just need to match them up to find the yearbook senior section ideas that will work for you.
So to give some examples of how you can show the many aspects of senior year, we came up with five awesome yearbook ideas that encapsulate what it feels like to be a senior. But first, let’s talk about finding the right angle for your senior pages.
Choosing an Angle for Your Senior Section
First thing’s first: you need to decide what, exactly, you’re hoping to achieve with your senior section. Here are a few angles you can take:
- Maybe you want to show a different side of students’ personalities than what you see in class. Then you’ll want to focus on things that students do outside of school, whether at home or out in the world. We even love the idea of showing the more playful, rebellious side of students (more on that later).
- Maybe you’re hoping to express all of the many — and let’s face it, sometimes messy — emotions of the final year of high school. There’s excitement, anxiety, curiosity, just to name a few, not to mention the fear of leaving school and becoming “an adult.” In our experience, seniors have a lot to say, and if you take the time to talk to them, it’ll pay off in an introspective, meaningful section that seniors will appreciate now and later.
- Maybe you want to reflect on the profound and sometimes weird changes seniors undergo over four years of high school. Ask your seniors how they changed since they were freshmen, and this opens the door for students to talk about what they consider their personal accomplishments. This could be in class, in extracurricular activities, or at home, opening the floor to a student who’s gotten over stage fright in theatre class or someone who’s picked up a talent for riding a unicycle. Senior year is a time of accomplishment, and this kind of section is a perfect place to highlight it.
These are all great angles to take, and you could even incorporate several of these ideas into one bang-up spread. But the bottom line: We think it’s important to honor this period of transition in your yearbook.
So now that you’ve decided on what you want to achieve with your senior pages, let’s get to some of our favorite yearbook ideas that capture all the excitement of the final year of high school.
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Senior Shenanigans
We wouldn’t normally advocate missing class or causing disruptions, but after almost four years of being on their best behavior, we can see the fun in a senior skip or prank. (As long as they don’t hurt anyone, of course.)
If a skip day or prank is part of your school’s senior year tradition, consider a spread that highlights the biggest and best of it.
Given the potentially tight turnaround (most skip days and pranks we’ve heard of happen in the fall), you’ll need to plan ahead for this. Have a senior on your staff own the coverage, so he or she can work ahead and still keep everything secret from underclassmen.
We can imagine some readers and administrators cringing at this idea, but if it’s done right, a spread on these traditions will celebrate your seniors’ independent, creative side. And that’s worth including in the yearbook.
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Senior Polls
No doubt, seniors have a lot on their minds. They’re asking themselves, “What’s next year going to be like?” “Will college be hard?” “Will I still see my friends?” “Will I be able to find a job?”
Give everyone a glimpse into what it’s like to be a senior by polling your graduating class on all of their feelings. Here are some of our favorite ideas for a poll:
- “What Scares Me Most About Next Year”
- “What I’ll Miss the Most About High School”
- “What I’m Most Excited About After Graduation”
You can use the poll results to make dozens of mods, adding quotes and pictures to your senior class portrait pages. It’s a great way to capture what your seniors are feeling, and it’s a sly way to get more faces into the yearbook.
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Teacher Thank-Yous
When you talk to students about their relationships with their teachers, you’re always bound to find a few that really make you feel inspired.
Maybe it’s because we’re firm believers in putting inspirational stuff in the yearbook, or maybe it’s because we think great stories deserve to be told, but we say you should give seniors a chance to thank the teachers and mentors that made a difference in their lives.
Ask students about the teachers — or coaches or staff members — that had a powerful impact on them in their high school career. Include some of the best stories, with quotes and pictures of the student and teacher together, in a full spread or placed appropriately in various sections (like Academics, Athletics, or Student Life).
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“How I’ve Changed”
Everyone loves a good “before and after” feature, and the growth that happens in the four years between freshman year and senior year can create fodder for some of the best.
Give seniors a chance to reflect on their first year of high school by asking them how they’ve changed since they were a freshman.
Physical transformations are fun to see, but you should also include stories about students that underwent less visible changes, like a student who’s overcome their shyness or someone who went from being on academic probation to achieving honor roll.
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Advice for Underclassmen
Ask seniors to give advice to your school’s underclassmen, or to report what they would have done differently during their first three years in school.
With those quotes, design a mod that includes some of the best responses with pictures of the seniors in question. The purpose here is two-fold: it shows how students’ attitudes have evolved over the previous four years, and it gets students reminiscing about their first days of high school.
The results would create totally unique mods for each class’ portrait pages, since your seniors will likely address specific timeframes in their high school careers.
Senior quotes, prom, and superlatives are tried and true ideas for your yearbook’s senior section. But if you want your book to show a complete picture of what it’s like to be a senior, you need to find the right coverage angle for the right emotion. These ideas can help you do that. And if you do, you’ll blow your senior class section out of the water.
