Planning Fun and Enriching Summer Programs!
An interview with Ellen O'Connell and Shelly Wilson

How are summer programs different from school year programs?

Having two to three times the amount of time significantly impacts programming, staffing, budget, and use of space. While devising a full day of programming can be a challenge, it can also be a great opportunity for you, your staff, and your youth.

Full days of programming provide more time to devote to activities and opportunities to explore topics at greater depth. The extra time also allows programs to offer more options to youth and incorporate elements like field trips.

Summer also provides new opportunities for the staff of programs. Summer is a great time to allow staff to plan and implement their own activities. Summer can be a learning experience for staff as well as youth.

While the hallmarks of creating an enriching experience remain the same in summer as during the school year, summertime allows you to be more creative in exploring topics and presents unique opportunities to really introduce kids to new ideas and experiences.

Do you have any recommendations for staffing for the summer?

Take the time to assess your current staff and consider their strengths and weaknesses. Use the summer as an opportunity to let staff try new things and engage in program planning. Ask them if there is something they want to do with youth that they haven’t been doing. Do they bring specialized skills or knowledge to the program that could be utilized, such as an interest in technology or arts?

Remember: The more staff are involved in planning activities, the more invested they will be in making them a success.

If your program employs Summer Youth Employment Program workers or other young people, make sure you have the infrastructure to use them effectively. Teenage staff members should really be thought of as a program in and of themselves. They can be a great resource but they also require a great deal of support and guidance.

Remember, these youth could easily have been a participant a week previous to the start of summer. What have you done to make them ready for their new roles? Provide them with very clear expectations and assign an experienced staff person to monitor, mentor, and develop teen staff.

Finally, as a leader you need to keep up morale. During the long summer months, people get hot and tired and cranky. You need to be camp “cheerleader” and keep your staff excited and engaged. Use incentives like food and special events to keep people’s spirits up, and give staff a day off or let them go early now and again. Everyone needs a break sometimes.

 How do you balance fun and enrichment in the summer?

First off, don’t make an explicit distinction between learning and fun. Youth shouldn’t feel like they are “earning” their fun by doing academic activities for a set amount of time. Instead, strive to incorporate learning experiences into all activities.

All program activities can be both enriching and fun: Youth can create games and a carnival based on books read; a dance activity can incorporate lessons about history and culture; and a messy and fun science experiment can engage youth in observation, testing hypotheses, documentation, and math.

One key to achieving a fun and enriching program is to provide structured time that feels unstructured. Good programs incorporate choice, time to socialize with peers and staff, and opportunity for physical activity. Make sure that staff understand that they do not abdicate their role during less structured time. When issues arise – fights, etc – they can be learning experiences. Staff should always be on the lookout for “teachable moments.”

Don’t miss out on field trip learning experiences. When the learning goals of a trip are clearly communicated to staff, they can be aware and intentional about what youth are to take away from a trip.

The extra time during the summer allows more opportunities to expose young people to new ideas and more time to process these new ideas through conversations between youth and staff. There is no competition with school day learning, and youth will be more ready to be challenged and engaged by new ideas.

Remember that learning is not just reading a book. When youth take part in well-designed activities, they will remain engaged, have fun, and not even realize just how much they are actually learning.

What are some things to look out for when designing a summer program?

Plan! Plan! Plan! Not planning out a schedule well in advance is a recipe for trouble year-round, but there’s so much time in the summer that planning becomes even more important. No winging it!

Staffing also becomes an even more important issue in the summer. Really empower your staff and give them leeway to explore in order to keep them excited. And go out of your way to support and mentor staff in the summer – your program is fundamentally about the youth, but summertime is also a great staff development opportunity.

Finally, recognize that a logistically well run camp is not necessarily a good one. Don’t mistake a well planned schedule for good programming. The challenge for camps is to balance the difficult logistics of summer with the need to offer high quality activities. Summer can seem very daunting at first, but by planning carefully and being intentional about learning experiences, you will ensure that the youth in your program have the enriching summer they deserve.

What resources would you recommend for summer programs?

You should definitely check out PASE’s Summer Learning Guide, which is available for free on our website.

The Center for Summer Learning at Johns Hopkins has great resources for summer programming.

The New York City Youth Guide to Summer Fun, a broad citywide calendar of family-oriented events and resources, is published annually by the Department of Youth and Community Development. The guide also includes a list of all public swimming pools and barbeque sites at public parks, as well as a comprehensive section on "Places to Explore" within the City.