Summer School In Action

Wow,  I thought I was going to have sooooo much time to blog over this holiday weekend, but I have been busy non-stop!  And by busy, I mean busy relaxing and having a blast with friends!  From laying by the pool, to going on a party boat, BBQs, and bike rides.  We have had the most perfect weather,  and I have been trying hard to soak up every moment!  So again, sorry for being a bad blogger.  I seriously have so many things I want to blog about too!

Today, I'll show you some stations in my summer school classroom.  We are at a different school this summer and in a completely new room.  I actually am in LOVE with this room because it has air conditioning and a sink! (Oh, the simple joys).

You can see more on our summer school schedule in this post.  We basically start our day with "morning group" where we are all together to discuss calendar, weather, and write our daily journal.  I just made a bunch of fill in the blanks on the white board, so we can go over it is a class, and then the kids can fill in the answers in their individual binders as well.

Next, we split into 3 groups and rotate through 3 stations. The kids do a teacher activity (see this post for some of the fun activities we have planned!).  We also have a station for worksheets (which is run by one of my assistants).  I had so many worksheets leftover from the school year, as well as workbooks with blank pages...so we brought those along to summer school.  Right now, we are working through the workbooks.  I have enough for each kid, so I create a list of pages for them to do each day.  After the kids complete each page, they cross it off and find the next one.  I was really impressed with how many of my kids were able to find the page numbers on their own!

The last station we have is "Games."  This station is also run by an assistant.  This station gives kids a chance to work on social skills and academic skills in a structured way.  We love putting kids "in charge" of games too, because then it becomes an even more naturalistic way to work on social skills.  

To make my labels for each station, I just folded construction paper.  Everything in my summer school classroom is still very structured (like our typical classroom), I have just been going about it in a simple manner with no fancy board maker pictures.  I also just posted our schedule on the white board and we check things off as we go.  I think it is nice to kind of change things up and get my kids used to following schedules and routines in a slightly different way, so they aren't dependent on doing everything exactly the same.