The hustle and bustle of the end of the school year has swept you up and now you have realized that you haven’t yet planned for extended school year. You panic, head to Google and do your best to find resources that will truly help your students make progress over your ESY session. Sound familiar? I know I’ve been there! Take the guess work out of extended school year with these 4 activities that your students will love!
First of all, you are amazing for taking on ESY. Teaching past the regular school year is no easy feat! But instead of letting ESY steal your peace, use these 4 activities to keep your students engaged and learning through the whole session!
Escape Rooms for extended school year
Escape rooms are an amazing way to help students practice all kinds of skills! Plus, student engagement tends to be much higher. This makes them my number one go-to ESY activity!
I’ve used escape rooms to target English language arts skills, math skills, matching, social-emotional practice and more. You could decide to create a room where students practice all of one type of skill or multiple types of skills.
You can also set up escape rooms to be digital or printable making them great for all types of learners. We know that so many of our students love using technology, so escape rooms can be the perfect way to engage them during your ESY session.
The beauty of an escape room is that it is a timed activity. Students get excited watching the clock count down and this keeps them moving along. Plus, you know exactly how long the activity will last making it easier for you to plan your day.
Task Cards
If, like me, your ESY class might consist of students who are not typically on your caseload, it can quickly feel overwhelming! Enter task cards.
Task cards are a perfect solution for getting all of your students the practice they need. And having summer themed task cards work even better to keep your students engaged!
Before ESY starts or at the beginning of the session, take a little time to review each of your students’ IEPs to identify specific skills they should be working on. Find corresponding task cards and set up an independent task card bin for each of your students. That way you can easily pull out the bins and get all of your students working at the same time!
Social Skills Practice for extended school year
With ESY typically being a more slow-paced and laid back time, I find that teaching social skills can be very effective and engaging. I can take more time than usual to work one on one with students and can better meet them where they are at with specific social skills activities. Also, I can easily pass out social skills practice activities to the whole class so it is a win-win for whatever situation you might be in.
Here are some social skills activities you can use this ESY:
- Matching emotion words to facial expressions
- Emotion identification task cards
- Identifying emotions with coloring activities
- Drawing and writing about what makes them feel a certain emotion
- Mini-booklets with examples of different kinds of emotions
Want to learn more about bringing social skills practice into your classroom? Check out this blog post!
Tracing and Fine Motor Practice
Extended school year is the perfect time to get back to basics and practice fundamental skills that might get pushed to the side during the regular school year. That is why I love providing my ESY students with tracing and fine motor practice!
So many of our students struggle with writing and other fine motor tasks that they have to use frequently throughout their school day. Getting in some extra practice during ESY is a great solution. Plus, there are so many ways to make tracing and fine motor practice engaging.
- Summer themed tracing sheets
- Create a summer collage to practice scissor skills
- Use clothespin with task cards or to pick up and count small items
- Create fun summer q-tip paintings
No matter what type of fine motor activity you choose, your students will love getting hands on during ESY!
Take the stress out of planning extended school year
Still panicking because you don’t have time to pull everything together? No worries! I’ve created an Extended School Year Bundle just for you so that you can breeze into ESY with no problem.
In this bundle you get:
- Beach Themed Escape Room
- Bug Escape Room
- Counting Ladybug Task Cards
- Counting Bees Task Cards
- Unicorn Social Skills Activities
- Plants Science Unit
- Yearlong Bundle of Tracing Pages
Don’t Forget to Pin These ESY Activities for Later!
