With summer break starting, children will be needing activities to keep themselves busy. Summer school is the perfect way to keep children occupied and also incorporate learning in the whole process. Whether you’re running an independent summer school or have to plan the summer semester at a school, you need to find the right balance between learning and fun.
After all, it is summer vacation, so your summer school needs to be fun. In addition, you need to offer unique activities which make you stand out, so that parents and students know that you’re offering something valuable that will be worth their time. Here are a few ideas to get you started.
Involve Students in Making Their Timetables
Give the students a feeling of responsibility by having them make their own timetables for the summer. These timetables can include what you do in summer school as well as what they have planned at home. Let students practice their design skills by having them customize the timetables using the templates on PosterMyWall.
They can play around with colors, fonts, pick their own designs, and do much more with these templates. Then, you can print these out for them to take home and put up somewhere visible. This will also be a great help for parents who have multiple children doing various summer vacation activities.
Incorporate Learning Goals into Pool Activities
With temperatures rising, there’s no better place to go than the swimming pool. If your summer school has its own pool, then that’s awesome, but if it doesn’t, then you can arrange activities at a public pool as well. Incorporate learning goals and educational aspects into pool time to get the best out of it.
You can have children practice their counting by collecting pool noodles from around the area. You can also teach them about concepts such as buoyancy and surface tension while they’re in the pool. This will not only help them improve their swimming, but also increase their knowledge.
Take Students on Fun Trips
Many museums, parks, and other public places have special summer activities and workshops going on for students. You can arrange field trips to these places, and arrange some activities there. If you have a nice museum in the area, you can arrange a tour there, and have children discuss what they learned with a fun creative activity afterwards.
Also, check out local theaters and cinemas to see whether they have something educational playing, and take your summer school participants there.
Encourage Work in Different Mediums
Summer school is the perfect opportunity for children to explore their skills and creativity. Give them thematic prompts linked to your learning goals, and then let them respond to them in their own ways. Writing enthusiasts can submit text, while students who prefer visual elements can make graphic designs using tools like PosterMyWall.
You can encourage this creativity with your learning goals in hand. So, keep a crafts corner in your summer school as well, with art supplies for children to experiment with.
Run a Summer Reading Program
The summer vacations are a great time for children to develop a reading habit and find what sort of books catch their interest the most. Help them explore this interest by running a summer reading program. Assign different books to read, and then hold a discussion and fun activity afterwards.
When the summer school is wrapping up, have students dress up as their favorite book characters and talk about what they liked the best in the different books they read. This will inculcate a love for reading in these students, which will hopefully last.
Include Parent Participation
When it comes to schoolchildren, parents are usually quite involved. In addition, they’re the ones who decided to put their children in summer school, so encouraging their participation is necessary. Keep them abreast of what children have learned in your school, and also host a parent-child day with a number of different sports and craft-related activities.
This will serve the purpose of helping the families bond, and also showing the parents the high quality you’re offering in your summer school. This way, you’ll be more likely to get regular students next summer as well.
Have Students Take the Lead for an Event
Develop a sense of responsibility in your students by having them take the lead on an event. Organize them in groups, and give each group a different aspect of the event, such as decorations, activities, and invitations.
This can serve as a sort of showcase to end your summer school, so you should invite parents and other relevant community members as well. You can even arrange catering or a barbecue to make the event bigger and really make a name.
So, there are a number of ways to take your summer school beyond the level of revision and preparation, and keep things fun, you’re adding a lot of value to student’s lives.
