15 May June, July and Last August – Our Plan for Summer, 2013

It’s Not Summer in the Northeast Yet

“Summer” (according to the public school calendar) does not really start in the northeast until mid-late June. Schools are usually in session until around mid June and then the don’t go back in session until the last week of August. As a result, we usually do our summer programming during the months of July and August. We create a summer team of volunteers and we implement a Summer XP from 252 Basics.

Our Original Plan

This summer, our plan was to do one month of Base Camp from 252 Basics in June and then implement Orange’s latest Summer XP; One Big Story-Turn It Up. That’s what we’ve done in the past and it’s always worked pretty well. However, we learned that Orange was recommending that we hold off on using the One Big Story XP until next summer as a follow up to this upcoming school year’s curriculum. Learn more about that from 252 Basics here. We really liked that idea, but it meant we had to come up with something for this summer!

Our New Plan

We knew that 252 Basics had created a summer series within the curriculum they planned for June and July called Base Camp. We decided to push those two months to July and August and make that our summer XP! Easy enough-right? WRONG! If we did that, we had no curriculum for June. We thought about trying to use this coming August’s Life App, but we knew that it was the kick off for the One Big Story Scope and Cycle beginning in the fall. We also knew that we might not get it in time to really brainstorm and prepare it for June. So, we looked back at Life Apps that we had from previous summers. Since we’ve always implemented a Summer XP, we’ve archived the curriculum from July and August each year… for situations just like this! So, this June, we are going to implement last August’s curriculum which featured the Life App of Contentment.

Twists, Turns, and a Few Bumps

Choosing to do all of this shifting of curriculum seems like it would be easy enough. Just swap one month for another, etc… but it never really works out that way. For example, in 2012, the month of August had four Sundays. We’re implementing that curriculum this year in June, which happens to have five Sundays. That means we will need to fill in that last week.

We’ll hit other bumps in the road too, like needing to finish the Summer XP before the last week in August (due to our Kindergarten Orientation scheduled for that day) and missing the entire first month of curriculum for the One Big Story-Scope and Cycle that begins in August (since we’ve bumped Base Camp to July and August). But, through all this craziness, I think we have a plan! Here it is:

• In June-we’re using August, 2012 Life App of Contentment for four Sundays.
• In July and August-we’re using Base Camp from June and July of 2013. We’ll kick off this Summer XP the last week of June since it is a five week month and we’ll omit one week of the series so we can end with one extra Sunday in August for regular programming during our Kindergarten Orientation.
• The last weekend of August, we’ll start our fall programming with one week from the August, 2013 Life App curriculum. We’ll choose one other week from the August curriculum to do in September.
• In September, we’ll omit one week of the intended Life App curriculum for September , 2013 so we can have 2 weeks from August and 3 weeks from September represented.

Whew-that’s confusing. We’ll be sure to keep you posted as we brainstorm ideas for our Base Camp environment and upcoming sets.

How about you guys? What are you doing this summer?