June 8, 2017

How can you make your program appealing to students, families, school and community? As you compile data for your end-of-year report, add a narrative story that “sells” your program, and it will help you take a step toward long-term sustainability.

Look at these examples and decide which approach has more power to demonstrate the value of your 21st CCLC program activities. Then start crafting your own and share it with your stakeholders!

Example 1. Oakville Afterschool Program

During the past school year, the Oakville program served 45 students from the first through fifth grades during the fall term, and 53 students from the same grades in the spring term. Most students attended at least three days every week, with perfect attendance by 10 students in the fall and 11 students in the spring. All students participated in the Homework Help activity, and most took part in the Readers Theater, where they focused on four different stories. Other activities included Chefs Club, soccer, jazzercise and chess. See the tables on the next two pages for data on student attendance and participation by our community partners and staff members. 

Example 2. Oakville Laughing and Learning Together

This school year, our OLL Together students and staff worked on literacy, math, team building and healthy living — and everyone got their homework done, too! Thanks to our new Student Ambassadors program, enrollment grew from 45 students in the fall to 53 in the spring — our kids love to make new friends! 

Readers Theater helped students practice important elements of literacy, such as plot, comprehension and motivation. When students produced Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, we asked science teachers to help with understanding the environmental theme. Everyone enjoyed playing with rhymes and meter when we wrote an original chapter about our Oakville environment (see the script on our Facebook page).

Our Chefs Club learned to prepare holiday dishes from different cultures. Our families provided recipes from American, Hispanic and Vietnamese traditions, and students practiced measurements and fractions as they worked in teams to test the recipes, develop the OLL Holiday Cookbook and prepare a December feast for families (see the photos on Facebook).

The local Youth Stages Art Company supported our production of The Lorax, helping our students get into costumes and characters in an authentic setting. Feel the Beat, a community dance group, provided our Monday and Wednesday jazzercise sessions, and sometimes our young musicians helped us keep the beat with their drums. From our University partner, men’s and women’s soccer players came on Thursdays to coach soccer. Our team especially enjoyed their day at the University playing on the “big” soccer field and touring the campus.

Our students told us, “This year was awesome!” We know they meant it, because they had great attendance (see enrollment, attendance and other data later in this end-of-year report). Thanks to our school partners, we could identify and target specific language, science and mathematics skills that needed to be strengthened — and we built those skills into activities that students wanted. Thanks to our families, we could help students learn more about other cultures and build friendships. Thanks to our community, we could encourage arts learning, good exercise habits and team skills — and give our young people a look at life on a college campus.

We agree: This year was awesome!

Reflection and Resources

So, what worked for you? Although the second example took more time to construct than the first, do you think that extra time would likely produce extra support?

Here are some Y4Y tools to help you strengthen your activities so your end-of-year report says “awesome”!

• Intentional Activity Design Diagram. This tool helps you look at student wants and student needs to design powerful activities.
• Knowing Families and Cultures. This tool helps you think about and plan ways to build cross-cultural understandings.
• Partnering With Schools. This rubric helps you rate how well you’re connecting with the school day and suggests actions that can help you improve. 
• Literacy: Six Key Strategies. This tool supports literacy activity design by suggesting strategies that support skill development in ways that engage students and family members.
• STEM Strategies and Techniques. Use this tool for ideas about how to promote science, technology, engineering and mathematics thinking and learning.
• Successful School-CBO Partnerships Training. This presentation can be used as-is or customized to meet your program’s needs.

June 8, 2017

Whether or not you offer a summer learning program, you can partner with families to use strategies that keep children’s brains active during the summer. We know that all students run the risk of summer learning loss, and children in low-income communities have the highest risk. Here are some ideas to involve your 21st CCLC families in helping students hold on to the skills they learned in the past school year. 

1.    Connect With Family Members

Work with school-day teachers to create tip sheets so families have ideas about how to help their students. Then, deliver the tip sheets when you can have a conversation, so you make personal connections and can answer questions. 

•    Meet at the program site. If you operate a summer learning program, provide the tip sheets when family members pick up their children at the end of the day, or during a family event that’s tied to program activities.

•    Make home visits. If you don’t run a summer program, plan a short visit to deliver the summer learning tips.

•    Meet in the community. If you hold a community-based event, use email, a postcard or phone call to invite families to come pick up their summer learning tips. You might do this at a book swap (see below) or when you have an informational event — perhaps at a local street fair or a local market.

2.    Promote Literacy

When students lose reading ability over the summer, they rarely catch up during the school year, and summer losses can really add up. By fifth grade, if learning stopped over the summers, a student may be two or more grade levels behind. Here are ways that families and programs can help students maintain their reading and writing skills:

•    Share books with families and encourage reading out loud every day. Your program can hold a monthly book swap — arrange a place and time (just half a day) when families can bring books to trade so everyone gets something new to read and enjoy. Ask a community partner to provide the location, and even to conduct a book drive to expand the reading choices. 

•    Use story starters to encourage writing and reflection about summer activities. In your program or at home, a sheet of paper with simple prompts can start student writing about summer activities. Thinking of family members as the audience, students can “tell about today’s adventure” or “explain what you learned when…” At the dinner table, everyone can read the story and discuss the activity.

3.    Practice Math Skills

When families know which math skills their students need to reinforce — fractions, multiplication, measurement or something else — they can involve students in everyday activities that require math:

•    Do the math when grocery shopping and preparing meals. Students can help their families by reading price tags and nutrition information to make good decisions at the grocery store. When cooking together, students can learn how to read recipes and measure ingredients, and how to expand or reduce recipe amounts to serve a different number of people. 

•    Make good home fix-up decisions. Students can help adults do the math to answer questions like these: How much paint does it take to give my bedroom a new look? How much lumber should we buy to fix the fence in the back yard? 

Y4Y Resources

Family Engagement course. Take advantage of this free online course to brush up on many aspects of engaging with families. Don’t miss the Coaching My Staff section if you want ready-to-use materials for your fall training.
 
Family Engagement Strategies. This tool includes some of the above ideas, and more. 

Family Engagement Implementation Planner. This tool offers strategies for welcoming family involvement in your program.

May 18, 2017

Holding a celebration at the end of a project or program session can accomplish several things:

•    Give staff and students something fun to look forward to.
•    Provide an opportunity to review, reflect on and demonstrate the learning that occurred.
•    Make meaning from the learning by planning a celebration that’s also an authentic assessment for students — and for your program.

What does “authentic” mean in this context? Perhaps you’re more accustomed to a similar term: “real world.” You hear that term a lot in the out-of-school time field. Real-world learning is the complement to traditional, classroom-based learning. Instead of listening to lectures and reading text, real-world learning generally has students construct their own learning paths in response to real-world problems or situations. Rather than passively receiving information compiled by experts and educators, students become explorers and experimenters. 

Does your program use project-based learning, STEM explorations, citizen science or other active approaches to learning? These authentic learning experiences can be celebrated in authentic, real-world ways. Successful celebrations happen when they’re tied to learning goals and planned accordingly. 
 
The following tips can help you provide meaning and rewards for students, while also gathering valuable information to inform your program’s continuous improvement process. (See Five Steps to Continuous Improvement for more information.)

1. Design early, and plan with the end in mind. This party has a purpose: tie the celebration to the learning goals of your major theme or activity. 
2. Give students choice and voice. Whether they work individually or in teams, guide students to appropriate demonstrations of learning that also reflect their interests. For some students, this may be making a video. For others, it may be writing and performing a play, creating a diagram that teaches others about a process, or contributing to a project conducted by professional scientists or historians. 
3. Get input from parents and program partners. Know about the community needs and values your activities should address.
4. Market your event. A real-world audience for the culminating event has value for your students, the community and your program. Plan the event’s timing and content to encourage participation. 
5. Make it an opportunity to reflect. Your staff and students will do a lot of hard work during the program term, so help them see the value of that work in the demonstration of results.

The Y4Y Project-Based Learning course offers examples of ways to structure culminating events and ideas about marketing your event. Also, the Y4Y Summer Learning course has tips for planning a culminating event. (Go to the Implementation Strategies section, click on “Menu” in the top-right navigation bar, and select Step 8.) 

Here are other resources to explore for ideas about celebrating student learning:

•    Culminating Projects at Reading Rockets
•    The FUN Factor: Culminating Events in Physical Education 

Y4Y Discussion: Learning Celebrations
What has your program done to celebrate the completion of learning events?

•    Maybe your students prepared a meal for a family open house at the end of nutrition/cooking project.
•    ​Perhaps students wrote and performed a play about the life cycle of monarch butterflies after your summer citizen science program.  

Please share your celebratory stories with peers and the Y4Y team on this discussion board. Our team members will check in, respond and prompt during the week of May 18 to May 31.

May 18, 2017

As you wrap up your school year or summer program, you will surely have plenty to celebrate. (See Six Tips for Celebrating Program Success for ideas about planning that special event.) Chances are, you also have ideas about things you want to improve, and applying a continuous improvement process can help. Not sure what that might look like? Get the Continuous Improvement Process Diagram from Y4Y.

Routinely following a continuous improvement plan will ensure your work goes smoothly. See the Y4Y Summer Learning course for guidance and tools to help (they work for the regular school year program, too). If you don’t have your plan and process designed yet, now is a great time to start. Here’s a preview to get you thinking — it includes links to tools that can help you organize for sound planning.

Step 1. Define What You Will Do
This step involves developing a purpose, goals and a logic model, which will be an important living document as you design, deliver and reflect on your program’s success. The logic model outlines these components:input: 

•    Inputs (your resources).
•    Outputs (your activities).
•    Intermediate outcomes (your benchmarks for progress).
•    Long-term goals (the impacts you want to make on student success).

Get the logic model tool here. 

Step 2. Implement With Fidelity
The best plan in the world may fail if it’s not carried out as designed. That’s why you’ll want to pay attention to how you implement program activities. Everyone on staff needs to understand the design and help monitor fidelity of implementation. Use the Observation Checklist to help with this step.

Step 3. Collect Data
The Y4Y Continuous Improvement Planner helps you track what and how to measure, who will be responsible, and when the measurements will take place.

Step 4. Analyze
Examine your data and reflect on results. How did each activity contribute to the results? What might you delete, tweak or add to get better results?

Step 5. Improve
As you plan for a new semester or summer, consider ways you might want to adjust your activities and your logic model to fit the next group of students you serve.

To become savvy about continuous improvement, take time to build your skills and knowledge right here on Y4Y! 

April 18, 2017

We've all experienced it, whether personally or on the job: that sinking feeling that there will never be enough money to do everything you want, no matter how you juggle the numbers. Fortunately, Y4Y can help take the pain out of financial planning for afterschool programs. Start here:

•    Getting a Jump Start on Summer: Budgeting. This two-part blog from a former director of the Providence After School Alliance offers practical planning advice for summer and school year programming. Read part 1 for budgeting tips, and part 2 for program planning advice.

As you tally funding and expenses for the coming summer or school year program, consider doing more to recruit and retain volunteers. Volunteers can help stretch your budget so you can offer more and better services. Try these Y4Y tools to recruit the help you need and to make volunteering a rewarding experience for everyone:

•    Recruiting Volunteers. Consider which program areas could benefit most from extra help, and match volunteers to needs with Y4Y’s Sample Volunteer Skills Grid. Then work with school and program staff to select a variety of targeted in-person and online recruitment strategies. Get the campaign started with our Volunteer Job Description template, which will help you craft a posting that appeals to potential volunteers. 

•    Retaining Volunteers. Because volunteers often don’t have experience in education, expect them to learn as they go, and help them along the way. Consider Y4Y’s Volunteer Coaching Scenarios, and think about how you would react in each situation. To get staff onboard with supporting volunteers, use our Working With Partner Volunteers Training to Go.