May 13, 2022

The sun is out, fruits and vegetables are in season, you have the luxury of time, and happy moods abound! How will your summer program be intentional in addressing students’ health and wellness? What pieces of a healthy summer can be carried into the next school year? Start with your school partnership and intentional program design to be confident you’re putting health first.

Be Ambitious

When it comes to student health, your program can afford to be ambitious this summer because you’re not in it alone! Your community is invested in your students’ well-being too, so bring them along. With those high ambitions in mind, assess the greatest health needs among your students.

• Consult the Guide to Health and Wellness Standards for Out-of-School Time Programs to get an evidence-based snapshot of ambitious yet reasonable expectations for your program.
• Then, customize the Y4Y tool Conducting Your Program Needs Assessment to include elements of physical, social, and emotional health. Your school principal can shed light on what the most pressing elements might be. See the Quick Guide to Initiating a Health and Wellness Partnership With the School Day for a five-step process you can use.
• Always remember that families are your first partner. Use the Y4Y Family Health and Wellness Self-Assessment tool to give them a voice in setting priorities.
• Other Y4Y tools in the Y4Y Health and Wellness: Partnering with the School Day Click & Go will guide you through many aspects of your health and wellness needs assessment.

Make Your Intentional Plan

Box checking can be exhausting, and each year it feels like there are more boxes to check. When it comes to health and wellness, take advantage of out-of-school time’s flexibility to lean into feel-good activities that boost spirits and by extension, student well-being.

• With needs identified, use Y4Y’s Program Self-Assessment of Health and Wellness Offerings to determine assets, resources, and practices you already have in place to meet those needs.
• Adapt Y4Y’s tools for intentional program design, activity design, and mapping needs to activities as you give shape to your summer program.
• Y4Y’s Activity Selection Guide to Support Health and Wellness will give you new ideas on addressing your specific needs.

You Are What You Eat

Nutrition can play a big role in your summer program. Last summer in a Y4Y Voices From the Field podcast, Simone Miranda of the Schenectady City School District shared how her program’s partnership with a local farm led to fresh fruits and vegetables — and career exploration opportunities — for her students. Renee Starr and Megan Grubb from Brooklyn Center Community Schools took this idea one step further by braiding 21^st CCLC funds with a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Every region has some form of agriculture that students can take important life and career skills from. And with a strategic partnership in place, maybe they can even take home some fresh food!

• What are your community assets? Dig deep into what organizations you can partner with by using Y4Y’s Mapping Needs to Partners, Mapping Community Assets, and Community Asset Mapping tools.
• As you reach out to new partners in your community, it’s helpful to create an elevator speech about your program. Adapt your speech for existing partners to emphasize the health and wellness needs of your students, especially those that have crept in as a result of the pandemic.
• With partners in place, consider all the ways good nutrition can be part of your summer. Cooking with students is a great opportunity to practice reading, math, and general problem solving as well as conversations and lessons around what constitutes healthy foods and portion sizes.

Our Friends the Neurotransmitters

Chief among the natural ways of boosting neurotransmitters associated with mental and emotional wellness are exercise, mindfulness, gratitude, novelty, goal setting, and time in the sun. Your summer program is the perfect setting for all of these, and Y4Y has tips, tools, and resources to guide you:

• Exercise: Be sure to consult Y4Y’s handy two-page Guide to Health and Wellness Standards for Out-of-School Time Programs and offer inclusive and expanded activities that are accessible to all students.
• Mindfulness: Check out the Y4Y tools on Best Practices for Mindfulness and Activities/Practices for Managing Stress.
• Gratitude. It’s wonderful and a no-brainer that wellness experts are recognizing the importance of actively reminding your brain of what you have in your life right now to be happy about. For tips on practicing gratitude in your program, see these Y4Y blog posts: Gratitude Turns What We Have Into Enough, Harness the Power of Positivity, and Thanking, Giving, Learning, Being (which discusses how citizen science activities can make students feel grateful).
• Novelty: If virtual learning taught you anything, it was how to get creative! By now, “creative” is probably your middle name! If not, try scanning past issues of The Y4Y Insider for dozens of creative program ideas!
• Goal Setting: Make summer a time for some reflection. You’ll find activity ideas in Y4Y tools like Goal Setting Activities, Games and Templates. For age-appropriate goal setting and reflection resources, see the student voice and choice tool collection. Include families with the Family Goal-Setting Survey – you can customize it to your summer health goals.
• Time in the Sun: This neurotransmitter booster speaks for itself. Remember your hats, sunglasses, and Y4Y’s Walking Scavenger Hunt Activity Planner. For many more success stories of outdoor 21^st CCLC activities, just go to the Y4Y home page and search “outdoors.” Leave all those screens behind – except sunscreen!

May 13, 2022

At each stage of child development, there are new cognitive horizons to explore. Summer’s the perfect time to open young minds to different ways of thinking. With guidance from Y4Y’s course on stages of child and adolescent development, think about summer fun like going barefoot, stargazing, nature journaling, or hosting a lemonade stand to support healthy development in engaging ways.

The Little Guys

A recent study of academic pre-k programs in Tennessee revealed that early childhood settings with an academic emphasis may better prepare first graders for testing than their counterparts, but ultimately those students don’t perform as well and are more likely to display behavior issues. The importance of having the freedom to explore at young ages is promoted by a Y4Y Voices From the Field guest, Stacey Gummey, as the foundation of the Hickory Hill Nature School, a “Nature Kindergarten.” While 21^st CCLC programs begin at the kindergarten level, these findings are a good reminder that “play” is a child’s work. Also, play nurtures creativity among people of all ages. That’s something to keep in mind as your team plans activities, especially during summer programming!

The Y4Y Child and Adolescent Development Matrix demonstrates that 4- to 6-year-old children are beginning to play cooperatively, are eager to show adults what they’ve learned or can do, are more attentive to details, and with an increased understanding of cause and effect, ask many questions. This summer, consider how your program can offer your youngest students the chance to explore new spaces as teams — whether indoors or out. Ask them the kinds of questions they might want to find answers for. Even if it’s a rainy day and the school cafeteria is the only space available for exploration, challenge them to see the space in a new way. What shapes can they find? How many tiles run along each wall? Are some surfaces more worn than other surfaces? Why might that be? Hopefully, you’ll have many new outside spaces to explore, with even richer discussions on tap.

You may be surprised at how much development can occur over a summer at this age! To ensure you’re meeting goals you’ve set for your summer program, download and customize Y4Y’s Individualized Observation Log for Early Childhood.

In the Middle

Returning to the Y4Y Child and Adolescent Development Matrix, you’ll see that students in middle childhood, ages 6-9, are transitioning from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” They’re becoming more interested in having special friends, can and should be tasked with more independence and responsibility, but still want to please adults and enjoy imaginative stories and play. While your summer programming will be a little more focused on academic recovery and reengagement for students in this age group, those academics can be imbedded in exciting play in your 21^st CCLC environment.

What sort of continuing theme might you weave through your summer program to spark the imagination of your students in the lower grades? You could designate your 21^st CCLC program as an old-fashioned newspaper office and put out a new issue each week with contributions from each student and their buddy on a topic of their choosing. (Be sure they research their subject!) Or maybe your program will become a space station or a candy factory. What roles need to be filled, and what are the responsibilities of each of those roles? Get serious about involving student voice with students in this age range. Y4Y offers student goal-setting tools for all grade levels (check out those for grades 2-3 and 4-6), and an activity choice form to get you started. And as with younger students, using the age-appropriate Individualized Observation Log to gauge student progress is essential.

What Summer Means to the Big Kids

Your summer program needs to be captivating to appeal to students in late childhood and adolescence. Through the end of elementary and on through middle school, students get better at planning. They usually experience a boost in self-esteem, though it quickly drops. They’re much more inclined to break into peer groups, and they have increasing awareness of linguistic and cultural nuances. Then on into high school, they struggle to gain more independence and develop greater anxiety about the future. High school students enjoy meaningful debates that demonstrate a greater awareness of the world around them. Most ultimately recover their self-esteem. They may even envision playing a crucial role in improving the world as they grasp complex problems.

Student voice is never more important than it is in your middle- and high school programs, so be sure to visit the tools that accompany the Y4Y course on student voice and choice and the Click & Go on recruiting and retaining high school students. For several years to come, your program will have to bear in mind that these are the students who missed some critical social and emotional development opportunities due to the pandemic. Despite the very great need for academic enrichment, evidence points to these students valuing the social aspects of your 21^st CCLC program above all. Of course, when you’re active in capturing student voice, those social bonds might be forming over an interest in STEM, spikeball, or hip-hop dancing — or all of the above! Get them involved in new and interesting ways to imbed academics in these activities and take a leadership role in implementing them. Remember, the sky’s the limit in summer, so if students suggest writing research reports on the invention of spikeball, choreographing a hip-hop routine around principles in geometry, or developing a word cloud around cold fusion vocabulary, get comfortable with the words, “Sure, let’s put it to a vote!”

May 13, 2022

Remember when playing on the computer was a fun thing to do? Afraid your students have lost out on that opportunity in the past couple of years? With tips from Y4Y’s course, The Virtual Edge, and Click & Go, Digital Literacy, you can make technology fun again when you use screen time wisely.

Make Safety Fun!

Sometimes students have a better grasp of what’s legitimate online than their adult counterparts. But often they don’t! Emphasizing how many bad people are out there wanting to do young people harm is no way to make students feel safe. So, make internet safety a game in your program! For example, you might stage a quiz show to help younger students understand the concepts of digital stranger danger. Ask questions like these:

1. Is it OK to share your birthday online?
2. Is it OK to share your favorite color online?
3. Is it OK to share your street address online?
4. Is it OK to share your pet’s name online?
5. Is it OK to share your Grandma’s name online?
6. Is it OK to share your shoe size online?
7. Is it OK to share your email address online?
8. Is it OK to share your favorite flavor of ice cream online?
9. Is it OK to share where Mom hides the key to the front door online?
10. Is it OK to share your name online? First, last?

Each of these questions can be conversation starters. Students have such vivid imaginations that a round of “What happens if…” for each of these will get those critical thinking wheels turning.

The same can be done for helping younger students judge how valid sources online are. Again, let each quiz show question be a conversation starter.

1. Is it OK to trust information on a site that ends in “.gov”?
2. Is it OK to trust information on a site that asks you for a donation?
3. Is it OK to trust information on a site that requires you to sign in?
4. Is it OK to trust information on a site that ends in “.com”?
5. Is it OK to trust information on a site that asks you to enter your birthday?
6. Is it OK to trust information on a site that ends in “.org”?
7. Is it OK to trust information on a site that makes you feel upset or angry?
8. Is it OK to trust information on a site that ends in “.edu”?
9. Is it OK to trust information on a site that your friend or family member sent you?
10. What can you do to verify if information on a site is true?

For your older students, download and customize the Y4Y Digital Privacy Self-Assessment tool (although they can benefit from a fun quiz show too!). And if you think your staff doesn’t know the best answers to the quiz show questions, direct them to a quick Y4Y training on internet safety with the Digital Literacy Click & Go, especially podcasts on Searching Safely and Evaluating Information and Digital Content.

Make Searching Fun!

Now that you’re confident that your students have gained some important safety rules, how can you make sure that during program time, digital learning — whatever form it takes — is fun? Y4Y’s new course on virtual learning addresses many of the needs of virtual programming, but there are some great takeaways that can help you reestablish a positive relationship between your students and their computers in your in-person environment. The Y4Y Virtual Powers Explainer is a great staff training tool for breaking down these concepts:

• Technology power is the ability to select and use virtual tools strategically to achieve a specific goal
• Relationship power is the ability to connect people and strengthen relationships
• Equity power is the ability to increase access and opportunity for all
• Personalization power is the ability to create learning that matches individuals’ strengths, needs, skills, and interests

Using these principles to guide your in-program digital learning is a great place to start to ensure student engagement. Next, check out Y4Y’s Technology Decision Checklist for Learning and Engagement, Intentional Activity Design Planner, and Virtual Edge Activity Planning Examples. Each will remind you that at the heart of any successful activity is student voice. Students feel empowered when they have a say in their learning, and digital learning is no exception!

What if Students Don’t Feel Empowered by Digital Learning?

There are a number of reasons students may still reject digital learning and even push back against it. Consider some of these possible explanations with tips on navigating this challenge.

• Natural extroverts prefer interactions. Every program has its social butterflies, and they’re more likely to want to interact with one another than with a screen. Make digital learning a group activity! Be sure that there are steps that demand conversation and compromise. This way, everyone in your program is building those 21^st century skills!
• Computers are associated with isolation. You may have students in your program recovering from varying levels of trauma over feeling “stranded” with a screen during the pandemic. As staffing allows, do more adult pairing or check-ins with those students who might be unexpectedly pushing back on digital activities. If there’s still cause for concern, consult Y4Y’s Click & Go on Trauma-Informed Care for more advice on how to make a student who has experienced trauma feel safe.
• Written English is even more challenging than spoken. If you have English learners in your program, be sure to seek out multi-modal and bilingual websites so these students can fully participate in digital activities. Don’t forget, Y4Y’s tools for supporting English learners (like Instructional Strategies for English Learners) are useful in all types of programming!
• A disability makes the computer a frustrating tool. The Secretary of Education recently called out the added challenges faced through the pandemic by students with disabilities, and the importance of providing them with the supports they’re entitled to by law. In your 21^st CCLC, you have some flexibility in program delivery that the classroom doesn’t have. Check out Y4Y’s Including Students With Disabilities course, and specifically the Expanding Activities tool, for general principles to follow so you can minimize student frustration with digital activities. Just like your natural extroverts or your students of trauma, it may come down to simple human connections to smooth the way.

Screen Alternatives

Two years in an online or hybrid environment definitely got those creative juices flowing on ways of giving students a break from screens. Some students are ready for those breaks, while others have had their screen dependence deeply reinforced through virtual learning. To further ensure that digital learning in your program is fun for students, share Y4Y’s Screen Time Alternatives tool with families to maintain that momentum of keeping kids occupied offline when they’re at home.

Computers Are Here to Stay

This far into the technological revolution, most of your staff members probably don’t remember a time when personal computers had no role in daily life. Despite this, access and ease with technology creates equity gaps. Giving your students skills and comfort with technology will be absolutely essential to their successful futures. That all starts by just having fun on the internet!

May 6, 2022

Y4Y’s course on fiscal management is at your fingertips for those last-minute worries around annual reporting. Check out quick links to frequent questions asked and answered! Y4Y has new tools for guidance specific to the financial aspects of program management, such as the Fiscal Management for 21^st CCLC Planning Checklist and Inventory Worksheet and Sample Tracking Form, but don’t forget to consult the Managing Your 21^st CCLC course and its list of tools as well.

At this reporting stage of your grant year, your fiscal planning should all be in place and almost fully implemented. If you haven’t been reconciling your budget records with those of your accounting department each month, make catching up on this critical step your first priority. Review and correct any discrepancies with your accounting department.

You may have been submitting financial reports — likely quarterly — throughout the year, depending on your state’s requirements. One lesson you may have taken from this practice is to make drawdowns at least quarterly, if not monthly, so you can gauge your expenditures and encumbered funds in as close to real time as possible. Do one last check against those cost principles — were all expenses allowable, allocable, reasonable, and consistently applied? Be sure that any other funding stream was accounted for separately, as each probably has different restrictions.

Were amendments made to your budget? Make sure you have easy access to all relevant documentation and communication around those amendments. Remember: anything above a 10% change between line items requires approval (but check with your state — the threshold may be even smaller). Stay on top of this step in advance of final accounting. Last-minute budget amendments may be interpreted by your state leadership as poor planning, but it’s still better to seek approval than to be out of compliance with your expenditures.

How might you spend down any remaining funds? Supplies, such as those needed for your summer programming, are an excellent option. Y4Y’s Sample Procurement Packet may be a useful tool. But be sure goods and services are delivered to your program site before the close of the grant year. Excess funds in your personnel line item? Y4Y’s Sample Time and Effort Report is a key tool for documenting in this area. Check in with your program team about best options for boosting staff morale with meaningful trainings to show your investment in them before the year closes out.

Final reporting in your state may include a continuation grant application. Especially if your state decreased funding in later years, be sure your program team has a sustainability plan. This plan not only helps you fulfill your state’s requirements; it also provides a seamless bridge to the future of your program, not just to the next fiscal year, but beyond.

Communication with your state coordinator is key at this time of year. Be sure to check in with them along the way for reassurance, tips, and any modifications to the reporting process. It’s not just their job to make sure you’re “doing it right,” — it’s their job to make sure you succeed. Your 21^st CCLC program played an essential role in student reengagement and academic recovery this year, and you’re making a positive difference. Make sure the numbers tell that story!