The post-COVID youth program will be ready to work on tackling learning loss from COVID but also to provide a more robust program that will engage students in finding reasons to want to learn and have positive interactions with each other.
COVID has created a lot of challenges for youth programs. Not least of those are decisions about safety which have been at the forefront – reducing capacity is a tough choice when you know the consequence is fewer kids served. However, keeping our students and youth staff healthy is vital for continuing our program.
The silver lining of COVID is the inevitable reflection on how things were and the prospect of how things will be once we get this infection under control. Those conversations have been some of the most inspiring moments of the last 18 months. In that time, our program staff have learned how to do remote programming, giving us an opportunity to view our daily operations in a different light and be able to provide alternative options in the future.
We’ve learned how to package valuable food, learning and play into a box and get that to families safely. And we’ve been thinking about what we really want to do in the coming year.
The ideas come thick and fast, but a few have stuck – we’re increasing the educational component of our work now. Starting with a fabulous book called Math Fact Fluency, we’re creating lessons that leverage the work of math teachers in the classroom, under the guidance and with the support of our math coaches. And recently the team learned from a seasoned elementary teacher how to build our activities according to state standards.
It’s not just academic standards though, the Indiana Afterschool Network offers standards for many aspects of programming and we’re revisiting those in priority order, starting with our social-emotional learning programs which are a particular area of specialty at Mary Rigg.
The post-COVID youth program will be ready to work on tackling learning loss from COVID but also to provide a more robust program that will engage students in finding reasons to want to learn and have positive interactions with each other.
