This weekend, after a week of gray skies and drizzle in New York, we made it to the sunny seventies! Unfortunately, many New Yorkers could only experience the changing weather through their windows, or on an all-too-brief excursion to the nearest park. This weekend’s weather gave us a glimpse of the summer to come, but this summer, like so much in this past few weeks, will be different - so how can we adapt?
With drastically less individualized attention and support for students this semester given limits on teaching time and interruptions to the curriculum, it’s all the more important that students engage in academically and socially enriching activities over the summer. Many summer opportunities are in limbo for the time being, or have already been canceled, leaving students (and parents) without access to the kind of environments they usually enjoy. This week, though, we posted a slate of workshop offerings that take our annual Smarter Summer writing camps online, and add a few extra options as well!
These workshops are designed to teach students useful skills, give them a voice in exploring topic areas that interest them, and provide personalized feedback and instruction in a small-group setting. At the same time, we’ve always been keen to keep summer workshops fun and socially stimulating, with frequent group game breaks along the way. Attendees of our in-person workshops come back year after year, and look forward to the experience -- even those who are openly unenthusiastic about writing in a school setting. All students produce a piece of writing to be proud of, and more importantly, leave with a set of tools and strategies they’ll be able to apply in the future.
We’re taking what we’ve learned from remote instruction these past weeks and applying it as we adapt the in-person experience for a digital platform, working to maintain the same essential structure and opportunity both for academic growth and summer fun. With weekly elementary level sessions and our usual middle and upper-level offerings on journalistic/expository writing and persuasive writing and speechmaking, along with all new workshops on poetry, playwriting, and Shakespeare, there’s plenty to choose from!