Fun Summer School Activities for Elementary Students

When summer rolls around, teachers face a unique challenge: What do we do with students during the summer?
Whether your students are going to be in ESY reading, math, or social skills groups, we still need to address their IEP goals, provide meaningful learning opportunities, and somehow make it all fun.
When I used to teach summer school, it was one of my favorite times to teach. (I only don’t now because of my own kids!) The summer months offer a unique opportunity to focus on skills students need to grow while keeping things light and engaging. It’s the perfect time to balance structured learning with plenty of opportunities for play and to approach the day with a laid-back energy. In most schools, the only requirement for students is to work on IEP goals and objectives.
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This means we can present those goals with any materials we’d like! This is amazing because the opportunities are endless and you can give students such a varied experience during the summer.
How do you structure a day of summer school to begin with?
ESY isn’t a typical classroom environment. It is usually less structured, much shorter in duration, and overall a more relaxed environment. So, how are we supposed to schedule in work tasks, fun activities, and continued learning into such a short day?
In order to make the most of the time you are given during an ESY day, you have to maximize your time blocks.
Of course, your approach will vary depending on the age and abilities of the students you work with. However, there are some universal building blocks you can use to structure your summer program effectively. Let’s dive into those blocks and explore how they can work for you.
The Perfect Blocks for Summer Learning
Morning Meeting
Starting the day with a morning meeting helps students ease into the routine. You can make this more structured by doing the same routine daily that includes a morning meeting activity, or make it more of a general hello and introduction to the day. Either way, you can work on social skill IEP goals during this time.
Use this time to:
- Practice greetings and establish a welcoming environment.
- Review the day’s schedule to provide structure
- Have students make choices for their day
- Incorporate social skills practice, such as taking turns sharing or participating in a group activity.
Morning meetings can be short and sweet but set a positive tone for the rest of the day. With older kids, you can bring in a lot of personality to these meetings and bring in more pop culture references to really get buy-in.
Need materials for this? Check out these task boxes that would make covering SEL skills SO easy.
Group Mini Lesson
While ESY is targeted and individualized with IEP goals, we still want to capitalize on small group, collective learning. One way to do this is with mini lessons. These can be as simple as a group read aloud with comprehension questions, or as in-depth as the writing process.
Mini lessons can be quick and interactive, ensuring students stay engaged, while also giving them broader skills that support their learning and development. Generally, you’re going to reteach concepts that a particular group of students learned during the regular school year. Essentially doubling down on certain grade-appropriate skills.
Tailor your lessons to the individual needs of small groups of students, using visuals, manipulatives, or games like math games.
Keep lessons short (10-15 minutes) to maintain attention and provide opportunities for active participation. These group lessons can also include engaging ways to challenge students with grade-level appropriate math problems or word lists.
While we know that students are in ESY to practice skills they haven’t mastered, we also want to highlight the areas they are doing well in and give them opportunities to build on that, as well.
Need some engaging materials? Here are some fun Boom Cards to check out: beach themed ones or space themed.
Independent Stations/Work
We love stations and center rotations! Stations allow students to work at their own pace while practicing key skills. It’s prime time for IEP goal practice. You don’t have to have in-depth stations set up to make this a really powerful activity for your students. You can simply create an outline of what you’ll have students do during stations where they will work on their specific IEP goals.
Here are some stations to set up:
- Reading with leveled books.
- Hands-on math activities with manipulatives.
- Create a sensory station for students who may need breaks to self-regulate.
- Targeted worksheets like this ESY math curriculum or this ESY ELA curriculum.
Use this time to address IEP goals by providing differentiated materials that meet individual needs.
Try to build independence during this block. Rotating through stations also helps students build focus and encourages their confidence. Educational activities like board games or card games can also be included as a fun way to reinforce learning and bring in that light-hearted summer element.
Read Aloud
A read-aloud is a great activity for all levels during the summer! It’s an awesome way to way to foster listening skills, introduce new vocabulary, and explore themes in an engaging way.
Choose new books that align with your students’ interests or a theme for the week/month. Make it interactive by asking prediction questions or having students act out parts of the story. You can also use read-aloud time to emphasize the main idea, details, and structure of the story. If a student is working on comprehension, you can also ask comprehension questions
A great way to keep kids engaged is by creating fringe vocabulary board that go with the story!
Free Play
Summer is the perfect way to incorporate more unstructured play into the day. Free play allows students to develop social skills, problem-solving abilities, and creativity. It’s wildly more important than we give it credit for and also very much underutilized.
Letting your students play in ways they love allows them to find new ways of communication, expressing themselves, and helps their physical and mental health.
Here are some ideas for inside play if that’s your only option some days:
- Sensory bins or playdough to work on fine motor skills.
- Open-ended building toys like LEGOs or wooden blocks.
- Cooperative games that encourage teamwork like puzzles.
By balancing structured activities with free play, students get the chance to recharge while still practicing important skills. Activities like a relay race or using pool noodles for obstacle courses can incorporate physical activity and outdoor fun.
Make sure you add this block every day!
Fun and Impactful Summer Activities
Now that we’ve explored the foundational blocks for your daily schedule, and given you some ideas for how to use them and what to teach, let’s dive into some specific activities to make your summer program both fun and meaningful.
These 5 activities are general ideas that you can utilize however you’d like. They can be incorporated into many different blocks as I’ve outlined above too.
1. Themed Activities
Themed weeks or days are an exciting way to keep students engaged and make summer even more unforgettable.
Choose themes like “Under the Sea,” “Space,” or “Animal Adventures.” Activities could include themed crafts, storytelling, or scavenger hunts. You can go all-out with room transformations, or do something super simple like themed worksheets only.
The beauty of themes is that they can be incorporated across all schedule blocks such as during morning meeting, read aloud, and independent work.
If you choose to do an ocean theme, here’s a fun activity as an example:
Create an ocean sensory bin with blue-dyed rice, small plastic sea animals, and scoops.
Students can practice fine motor skills and expand their vocabulary by naming the animals. This hands-on activity is a fun summer school class idea for younger children.
You can layer in a read aloud about the ocean, add a counting aspect to your sensory bin for math skills, and more to tie in the theme across your other blocks.
Add in adapted books all about ocean animals to bring in comprehension, vocabulary, and other reading skills. Click here to check them out.
2. Outdoor Activities
Take advantage of the summer days by planning outdoor activities that get students moving. Like I mentioned earlier, kids need more movement time than we give them in school and summer is the perfect time to remedy that. Play can help with gross motor skills and encourage teamwork.
Here’s an example: Set up a water balloon toss or relay race on a really warm day. Students can work on hand-eye coordination, turn-taking, and cooperative play. You can also up the ante by being a part of the water fun yourself! Pro tip: wait until the end of the day for this one!
Outdoor adventures are a great idea to make learning fun.
3. Virtual Field Trips
Not every program can take in-person trips, but virtual field trips are a great way to expose students to new experiences. If there’s one thing 2020 gave us, it was more opportunities for virtual experiences!
A quick google search will give you a ton of ideas, but some of my favorites are visiting places like national parks, zoos, aquariums, or even outer space through online tours.
Use a virtual zoo tour to learn about animals. Pair it with a scavenger hunt worksheet where students check off animals they see. This is a fun way to engage kids no matter what age and gives them the opportunity for new experiences they might not have had.
4. Science Experiments
Who doesn’t love an experiment! Of course, sometimes they can get kind of messy, but that’s where the most excitement happens. Hands-on experiments make learning memorable and fun. Tailor experiments to your students’ abilities and interests, or to the theme of the week!
Create a simple DIY lava lamp using basic supplies like vegetable oil, water, and food coloring. Students can practice the scientific method by predicting what will happen and observing chemical reactions.
These easy to make experiments also become wonderful pieces to add to your classroom calming toolkit if you have one. So, students can work on science while also learning ways to regulate their nervous systems. Win-win.
5. Movies
The best days are movie days in the classroom. We all remember our teachers putting on a movie and getting super excited as kids, right? Summer is prime movie-watching time and they can be both relaxing and educational.
Choose films that align with your weekly themes or reinforce social skills. A few favorites are Inside Out, Charlotte’s Web, and Finding Nemo. Bonus points if you tie in a read aloud to the movie!
After watching a movie, hold a short discussion, ask comprehension questions, or have students draw their favorite scene. This encourages comprehension and creativity while offering an enjoyable experience for the whole class.
Summer programs provide a unique opportunity to help students grow while keeping the atmosphere relaxed and playful.
By structuring your day with the blocks we’ve discussed and planning fun summer activities like creative hands-on lessons, read-alouds, virtual field trips, and more, you can create a program that supports IEP goals and keeps students excited to learn.
Whether you’re exploring the great outdoors, visiting a local museum or library, or diving into hands-on learning with simple science experiments, the summer vacation months can be full of growth and discovery while reinforcing learning.
We don’t want students to dread coming to our classrooms during the summer, so it’s our job to try to make it as fun and exciting as we can. It’s truly a great way for us to build connection with our students, as well.
Summer activities offer teachers the opportunity to show a different, possibly more playful, side to ourselves while still being professional and aligned with learning objectives. We get to see our students in a different light and offer them varied learning activities that lead to more unique experiences than the traditional school year.
We also get to help our students that may struggle with more one on one time and watch them become more successful. It’s a wonderful time to bridge the gap between structure and fun and bring our students along for the ride.
Whether you do all of these activities, or none of them, just remember that teaching during the summer is such a special time and the way you can impact students is beautiful!
And while it may feel a little overwhelming to plan at first, it doesn’t have to be. Your summer program can be both intentional and enjoyable for both you and your students!
Here’s to your best teaching summer yet!