Why Running Summer Groups Will Be The Best Thing You Do This Summer
Okay, okay working over the summer may not sound like the best thing you could do during your time off, but hear us out.
We know that many students face the ominous summer slide, and we know that students already have a gap in literacy skills that we are faced with according to NAEP data from 2022.
And…we know that parents are often looking for activities to keep their kids engaged over the summer.
Combine those two things with the idea that you might be able to make extra money this summer while doing something you love, and meeting a massive need!
So to answer the question,
Running summer groups could be the best thing you do this summer because
You’re making a massive impact and supporting students’ readiness for their next academic year
You’re supporting families while doing something you are passionate about
You have an opportunity to make extra money to do other things you are passionate about
It’s a win-win-win if you ask us.
Okay, so then what…
After you decide that this is something you want to consider, you want to put together a plan. We like to use the 5Ws strategy (who, what, when, where, why) when planning. Now, we usually use the 5Ws as a comprehension strategy for our students but it works really well for this purpose as well. It looks something like this,
Who would you like to work with?
You want to think about who you like to support most. What grade level do you like working with? What are their specific needs? When we put our summer group together, we determined that we wanted to support students who needed extra support and practice to develop literacy skills. Ideally, we wanted to support students across elementary breaking students up by grade level.
Kindergarten - 1st Grade
2nd Grade - 3rd Grade
4th Grade - 5th Grade
You can put this together in any way but this worked well for us!
What would a summer reading group look like?
The beautiful thing about this is that there is so much flexibility here. This can look any way you would like. We decided to run book clubs which was incredibly fun. For each group, we picked a book that we could dive into over the summer and put together lessons to target phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, reading fluency, comprehension, and writing. Our Kinder-1st Graders loved Hair Love by Matthew Cherry, our 2nd-3rd Graders loved Dingoes at Dinnertime by Mary Pope Osborne, and our 4th-5th Graders loved Lemonade War.
(If you want to grab our Book Club Units that are already done, you can grab them (and tons of other fun literacy activities) in the 5 Core Components of Literacy Library!)
When would you like to run the groups?
This is another beautiful thing about summer groups, you have flexibility here as well and can organize this in any way that works for you. Our book clubs were split into 8-10 lessons that explicitly taught concepts across the five core components of literacy. So we knew that we would need to see students for 8-10 sessions and each lesson took approximately two hours to complete. We scheduled our groups to meet twice per week for 2 hours and each group lasted one month. Now, again, the beautiful thing about this is that you can schedule this in many different ways depending on what works best for your schedule. You can be super flexible here!
Where would you like to run the groups?
There are a lot of options here for you to consider as well. You could look at community options, some schools (especially private schools) are open to you using their space, libraries, parks, office space with a psychologist or speech-language pathologist, etc. We have an office so we decided to just keep things easy and run the groups in our office, that said - get creative here!
Why provide this type of support specifically?
Another big question we always ask ourselves is why? So in this case, summer groups aren’t your only option - you could also tutor students, or provide intervention support one-on-one, or look at other options altogether. As you’re planning, you want to think about why this option specifically feels exciting.
When we decided to run summer groups, we wanted to build a sense of community for our students, we wanted them to share a love of reading around a book. We wanted them to have a chance to enter into dialogue and engage in the book’s content while also providing direct instruction in other areas (phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and writing). Given this, running groups felt like the best way to accomplish the goal but you will want to think about this as you work through the planning stage.
So, that’s it!
Running summer groups truly is such a great way to spend your summer. If you are interested in running literacy-based groups this summer but would like a little extra support in getting the business piece off the ground, let us help!