What is a Pacing Guide?
Pacing Guides are an incredibly helpful tool to communicate class expectations to your staff. This will be the only way your staff know what is expected of them to teach in their class. Pacing guides are spreadsheets with objectives and suggested activities listed for each day of camp. Your staff will look at these pacing guides to keep them on track and they will use these as a guide to create their lesson plans. Your staff are allowed to stray from the Pacing Guides and come up with their own activities as long as they are still meeting the listed objectives. The pacing guides that you are creating for your staff are just that, GUIDES. Once your staff has access to these pacing guides, make sure to communicate the expectations of this class to them.
What's in a Pacing Guide?
Pacing guides should include the Name of the class, the session the class is being run, the overall class objective (what should campers know/be able to do by the end of the session), daily objectives (what should campers know/be able to do by the end of the activity), ideas for activities that complete this objective as well as materials that may be needed for the suggested activity (ex. string, paint, popsicle sticks). A Pacing guide may also include a Pinterest link that has more examples of activities for the class. These Pacing guides are made by you. Make sure to ask questions and get any necessary help for ideas.
Example of a Pacing Guide
A lesson plan is a spreadsheet made by the staff that is a plan for what specific activities they plan to do and how long those activities will take. The most important part of the lesson plan is the materials list. Once the staff have decided which activity they would like to do, they need to make a list of all the materials they need to complete this activity. Once they have filled this portion out, it is your job to ensure they have these materials. This may just mean collecting the objects from Langton 126, finding them in the Education or Science closet, or even requesting that they are purchased. An easy way to know what materials your staff need, you can create a Google Form that is formatted like a survey, which the staff can fill out for each day of camp. Here is an example of this: Materials Request
Lesson Plans can be structured however is most applicable to the class structure but we have typically been organizing it by activity, amount of time spent on that activity, the staff that will be leading the activity, what lesson is planned, and what materials are needed for the lesson. Here is an example of a completed Lesson Plan.