Summer blast off event at Markham: it’s summatime!
Today City Year at Markham Middle School hosted a schoolwide event for students and parents to play games, win prizes and most importantly, find things to do during the summer! My teammates Daniel and Becky worked extremely hard putting the event together and invited a lot of community based organizations in South Los Angeles and Watts like the local library, gang reduction programs, UCLA’s summer UniCamp, among others. City Year put together four booths with different themes — literacy over the summer (the one I worked on), summer games, academic games for over the summer and fun and free things to do in Los Angeles.
It’s always hard to take photos during an event because I can’t leave my booth, but I tried:
Marissa, Ricky and I at our booth. We made handouts that showed students why summer reading is so important (if a student doesn’t read over the summer, he’ll fall behind grade level, which most students are already far below). The handout also included calendars to make a summer reading schedule as well as crossword puzzles and games. We raffled off a bucket of school supplies and a dictionary to look up words they might not know when reading this summer.
The students also got to play two games at our booth — one that made them separate fiction and nonfiction books and another that had them spell out as many words as they could with the letters given. If they played they got a free snack or book.
All the community organizations that showed up before students visited the booths!
Students racing at the summer games booth
Lemonade stand with Melanie and our little student helper
Charlotte showing students fun and free things to do in LA this summer on a map and in the pamphlet they made
Jeanny playing a carnival water squirt gun game
Next week is our last week at Markham. I don’t even know what to think and cannot believe I will be writing my year summary blog post soon. This year went by way too fast…stay tuned for my final City Year post and a South African bake day/presentation for my students next week to teach them about where I’m moving to!
Happy Summer!
Liz
