26 May Summer Plans!

Summer in Maryland

I know that in many areas of the country, the school year ends in late May and kicks off again in mid-August. As a result, many churches program for summer in June and July.

Here in the North East, however, kids attend school through mid to late June and the new school year doesn’t start until the final week of August. In addition, the children’s ministry at my church implements a Summer Team of volunteers to give our weekly small group leaders a bit of a break over the summer. Since parents and potential Summer Team volunteers are still in the throws of school/end of the year activities, it is hard to recruit volunteers to start serving on our Summer Team in June. As a result, our summer programming (and Summer Team of volunteers), run throughout July and August. As 252 Basics users, this has created a bit of an issue for us since they create summer series for the months of June and July, but – we came up with a plan!

Summer XP turns VBS

Back in the day, 252 Basics used to create an 8-9 week Summer XP each year. We loved them! We used one each year. In those days, we would keep our regularly scheduled programming and curriculum going through the end of June and then implement one of the Summer XP’s through July and August. In September, we’d be right back on track with the 252 Basics curriculum. The July and August months of curriculum would not be used, but we would download them and save them for a rainy day. We used that plan for the following series:

• Live It Out
• Chase the Light
• Jump
• Zapped

A few years back, 252 Basics began implementing the 2 month- summer series programming that they offer today and shifted the Summer XP’s to VBS programs. We considered using the VBS programming as our summer series – spreading the 5-day program over 5 Sundays, but we really wanted our series to cover all 9 weeks of July and August. As a result, we began implementing the summer series that 252 Basics offered for June and July each year as our summer programming for July and August. The only problem was that we did not have any curriculum for June!

Saving for a Rainy Day Works!

Remember that curriculum that we saved for a rainy day? Well – we used it! The first year we implemented a summer series in July and August was when we did the summer series EPIC. We pulled curriculum from the prior summer that we had saved and used that in June of that year. Then we used the Epic-Trust/Faith series in July and August. We really liked that plan, so we kept going with it each year. We did the Basecamp series (Wisdom, Faith and Friendship), Harmony series (Friendship) and Superheroes series (Conviction) in July and August over the last 3 years and pulled the August curriculum from the year prior to implement in June.

This can get a bit tricky because not all of the months have the same number of weeks, so often we are editing curriculum to reflect different dates and omitting a week here or there, but for the most part – this plan has worked well for us and our kids get excited about our summer programming each year.

Changing Things Up!

Summer Programming looks very different for us. The use of a Summer Team and our desire to create momentum going into summer (and again in the new school year) has caused us to rethink the way we structure our Sunday mornings throughout the summer.

Our inspiration for this came from those original Summer XP’s mentioned earlier. The XP’s always included extended large group time with the use of extra videos and a theme song that went along with each series. We’ve kept this Summer XP model as we implement the summer curriculum each year and intentionally extend our large group time. We also create themed stations throughout the entire environment that kids go to when they first arrive. The use of these stations and a longer large group time allow for shorter time in small groups. That would never be our goal throughout the school year when our focus is always to Lead Small. However, since our weekly small group leaders take time off during the summer and our Summer Team Volunteers are often people who are serving in kids ministry for the first time, we feel shorter time in small groups helps keep things simple and easy for them and helps the kids have a change of pace.

You can read more about the details of how we program for summer in this four-part series.

What does this mean for 2016?

Given the information described above, our plan for this summer is as follows:

• We’ve pulled last August’s curriculum out of the “vault.” The theme was Dig Deep and the Life App was Wisdom.
• We’ll implement that throughout June. June is only four weeks however and August 2015 had 5 weeks, so we cut one week of curriculum out.
• We’ll kick off our summer series – Where in The World on July 3rd!
• Since July is 5 weeks, the first four weeks will be this year’s June curriculum and the last week of July and 4 weeks of August will be July’s curriculum. So, our series will be the 9 weeks that 252 Basics wrote for June and July spread out over July and August.

I’ll be posting our plan for our summer series soon. I know many of you are already in the midst of prepping your environments for Where in The World. I’d love to hear all about what you are doing! Share your photos and ideas on Facebook, Twitter, or in the comment section below. Then I can steal some of your ideas and use them in July and August! 🙂 Seriously, I’d love to hear how you approach your summer planning/programming.

Happy Summer!