How I Prepare for Extended School Year
ESY or extended school year is an important part of many special education students' programming. If over the school year you have documented regression that a student has after a long weekend, vacation, or extended time off, they will be recommended for ESY for that summer in order to prevent regression of skills over the summer. It can be tricky to know how to prepare for ESY because it is often a less structured time of the year. Your principal, secretary, and other office personnel are probably not working. You might be working with staff that aren't typically in your classroom. If it is your first time preparing for ESY that is even more stressful! If it is your first ESY, this will be a helpful start-up guide for you. If this is your 15th ESY, this might include some different ideas for you to mix things up. When I am preparing for ESY, these are the things I think about:
1. Space & Materials- Sometimes, you will be asked to do ESY in a classroom that isn't yours. Or, you might have to share your classroom with another program or teacher. If that is the case, you need to figure out what size space you have, what are the features of the room (bathroom, storage, tables, etc) BEFORE the school year ends so you can plan to have your equipment moved. If your district is like mine, I need to have anything I'm bringing with me to another school labeled by the last day of school. You don't want to show up to the first day of ESY 30 minutes before the students get there and realize you don't have any tables!
Once you figure out your spacing needs, you can begin to think about the materials you might need. I like to use novel materials as much as possible over ESY. Why? Because I find that the students are more excited by them, respond better to their presentation, and are more likely to be engaged. You could absolutely bring all of the things that you normally use during your school year, but the summer is an awesome opportunity to maybe try different thematic units that are related to the season like beach, camp, ocean, or space. Anything that you can think of that might be hard to teach during the regular school year- this would be a great time to try those lessons out! There are amazing thematic ESY units on TPT- I've used Made for Me Literacy in the past and really liked those. I also like to use seasonal versions of the items we use everyday, such as summer file folders or summer task boxes.
Let this also be your reminder to check in with your SPED coordinator or ESY coordinator to see if they are going to be ordering any materials for your classroom for the summer. Often times there is a small budget for buying extra things like bubbles, chalk, paints, paper, food for cooking group, etc. Don't let your school year end before checking in to see if you're leaving money on the table!
2. Centers- Once you figure out the configuration of your space, you need to prioritize what centers you will have. For a 3 hour ESY program, you won't be able to get to everything you do during a normal school year so it is important to prioritize certain activities over others. For example, if you do a morning meeting, whole group social skills lesson, afternoon group, and movement group, you may need to cut out 2-3 of those whole-group times in order to prioritize IEP goals
How do you pick what centers to use? Look at the students' IEPs! If you have a caseload of students primarily working on academic tasks (reading and math), you might have a guided reading center, a math games center, an independent work center, and a . If your students primarily have pre-academic goals and are younger, you might want to select an independent work box center, a fine motor center, a 1:1 teacher center, a toys/games center, and an art center. If you have older students working on functional academics, maybe your centers are different summer-related classroom jobs, computer time, and leisure skills. The key is to look at all of the IEPs, think of the broader goal areas, and design a center that can meet the needs of all of your students in that goal area.
Quick note- I highly recommend using centers for your ESY classroom for a couple of reasons. First, you might be short staffed or working with unfamiliar staff over the summer. Having centers, especially a combination of independent and teacher led, will help with staffing issues when you are inevitably short staffed, and it will keep things fresh for your students. Sitting at a desk all day can be really tedious, especially during the summer when your students are on vacation mode! If you need help thinking of some centers for your ESY classroom, I have a free resource of suggested activities and schedules here!
3. Data- Data collection in ESY should be simple and easy. You are not looking to teach new things over the summer- you're looking to prevent regression. This is great news for you as the teacher, especially if you have a caseload you aren't familiar with! Because ESY is all about skill retention, your data collection should be more targeted towards, "Does this student know what they knew in the spring?" For someone who teaches their own caseload over ESY, you're going to have a pretty good idea already of what you are looking for from your students. Let's say your student is reading a level C text at a rate of 100 words per minute in the spring. When you are with them over ESY, all you should be keeping track of is whether or not they are at that same WPM. When I report out on progress notes in the summer, I'm not giving as detailed of a summary of what the student skill levels were, rather I am merely reporting out on whether or not the student maintained their Spring current performance levels.
If you are teaching a caseload that is new to you, you're not going to have any idea what a student's normal performance in any area is going to look like. This is where a Spring progress note comes in handy. If I were teaching a new class over the summer, I would look at their spring and fall progress notes to see where the students started their year, and where they ended their year in terms of skill progression.
I like to use probe data for ESY. It is a simple way to track if a student has maintained their current performance. I make a data sheet for every students' goal areas and objectives, write their spring current performance, and every day at ESY when we do skill review, I'm simply circling Y for yes or N for no if they performed or didn't perform the skill. Isn't that much easier?! I used to just carry over the data sheets I would use during the school year to summer, but reporting out on whether or not a student maintained their skills was more complicated. Using this kind of probe data, I can simply look at the weekly probe sheets and count the number of days it took the student to get to that first Y.
Bonus Tip: Make sure you build in time for fun! Even if it is just a 30 minute block of outside sensory play a day or maybe you bring in a sprinkler on Fridays, make sure that there are activities and rhythms in your classroom over the summer that make your students excited to be there. Going to school in the summer is hard even for our students who crave structure. Their schedules are often different, they might have siblings who don't have to go to school, and they're often doing really highly preferred things at home all day before they start your ESY program. Make sure you are considering the interests and hobbies of your students and integrate those into your weekly rhythms as a classroom to ensure that students are excited to come to you in the summer!
If you need resources to help you get your program set up, check out this ESY Bundle that will get you set up with everything you need to run a successful ESY program!
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