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It is important to think about how you might integrate reading, writing, or math skills in your program. This activity will help you think through how you might organize a lesson or activity around a content area that interests you or that you think most fits the needs of your students attending your program. Here you will find a list of resources by content area. Based on the content that you select, take some time to explore the resources and create a lesson or activity.

Reading Resources

Reader’s Theater

The following resources will help you plan for a reader’s theater activity. You will find sample lesson plan templates along with sample lesson plans that you can either use as is or modify to fit school-age children’s needs. 

• The SEDL National Center for Quality Afterschool: Story and Literature Dramatizations
  

• Reading Rockets: Reader’s Theater
  

Book Clubs / Literature Circle

Below you will find many resources that will help you create a book club or literature circle. Both resources provide information about specific parts of book clubs, like how to lead a discussion. 

• The SEDL National Center for Quality Afterschool: Book Discussion Groups and Literature Circles
  

• Children's Literacy Initiative
  

Reading Aloud

Both of the resources below provide tips and strategies for how to prepare for interactive read-alouds in your school-age program. 

• The SEDL National Center for Quality Afterschool: Read Aloud
  

• Family and Community Engagement & Afterschool Alliance: The Life-Enhancing Benefits of Reading in Out-of-School Programs
  

Writing Resources

Below you will find a wealth of information about how to incorporate writing in your school-age experiences and activities. You will find sample lesson plan templates as well as sample lesson plans ready for you to implement.

• National Writing Project: 30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

  The National Writing Project’s 30 Ideas for Teaching Writing offers successful strategies utilized by experienced teachers. For example, you will learn how to use shared events of students’ lives to inspire writing or how to use casual talk about students’ lives to generate writing topics.
  

• Read, Write, Think: Parent & Afterschool Resources

  While this resource is not writing-specific, it does provide some writing-focused activities by grade-level. For example, you will learn how to organize an activity where children learn how to write poems that look like things they describe or how to work with teens to create their own songs.
  

• SEDL: National Center for Quality Afterschool: Writing
  

• Teachers and Writers Collaborative: Resources

  Here you will find a variety of resources to help you support children’s writing development in creative ways. For example, you will learn about how to implement “Poetry Out Loud,” an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation that encourages children and youth to learn about great poetry through memorization, performance, and competition.
  

• IRIS Center

  On this website you can access specific guidance designed to help school-age children improve their writing, such as using the POW and TREE strategies.
  

Math Resources

The following resources detail lesson plans, activities, games, and teaching strategies that can be implemented in any after-school program. Review the following online resources and think about how you can use them to help school- age children and youth improve their math skills.

• National Council of Teachers of Mathematics

  NCTM offers standards-based resources to aid both teachers in their teaching and students in their learning of mathematics.
  

• New York City Department of Education

  Play Games. Board games like Monopoly, Clue, Chutes and Ladders, and many others provide practice in math skills, computation, and logical reasoning.