Teaching Summer School? We've Got You Covered.

“But at least you get summers off!”

How many of us haven’t heard this in response to our frustrations about the exhausting expectations of 21st century teaching?

While it’s certainly true that having summers off is a perk and a much-needed time of rest and recovery, it’s common for most of us to feel compelled to balance this time of rest with preparations for the rush of a new school year.

And taking the entire summer off is a privilege we can’t all afford. Most schools offer summer school as a way for students to retake failed classes or get ahead, clearing room in their schedules for an elective. This means teachers are needed in the summer, and for many of us, that’s two months of valuable income.

Even when teaching summer school you need the traditional first day materials. This Back to School bundle includes an editable infographic syllabus and all about me activity.

Unless you’re teaching summer school because you love it, we feel for you. You’re just as burned out and in need of rest as any other teacher, and, if you teach English, your classroom is probably full of students who are not there by choice. It’s rare that students take English in the summer to get ahead. Instead, your classroom is full of students who didn’t pass the class the first time around.

So, if you’re teaching summer school this year, especially for 9th or 10th grade English, let us make things as easy for you as possible. Don’t worry about lesson planning. We’ve got you covered with high-quality, engaging lessons that are ready to implement. All you have to do is teach and grade, and every unit comes with answer keys and easy-to-use scoring guides to make even the grading as easy as possible.

Ideas for Teaching Summer School

Let’s Start with Paperwork

It may be summer school, but you still need all the traditional “first day” materials. Our Back to School bundle has everything you’ll need to get started:

Our editable infographic syllabus template has room for all the important details laid out in a visually appealing way, and we’ve even filled in our classroom policies so you don’t have to start from scratch.
The syllabus template also includes a scavenger hunt worksheet you can assign to students for a more engaging first-day activity than listening to you read the syllabus aloud.
We’ve also included a daily agenda Google Slides template for you, with our favorite coffee shop design. Stay organized and let your students know what you’re doing each day while creating a relaxed atmosphere that says, “Yes, we know this isn’t how you want to spend your summer, but we’re going to make it as bearable as we can!”
Our simple, visually attractive All About Me worksheet makes a perfect first activity, even before that syllabus scavenger hunt. Give your students a chance to introduce themselves to you and set some goals for the summer before you get to work.
As a bonus for buying the bundle, you’ll also get a “This or That?” icebreaker you can use to get everyone talking and laughing on the first day about low-stakes questions that don’t require sharing anything too personal.

Start Class Each Day with Self-Paced Bellringers

We’ve tried a variety of bellringers over the years, and we finally found the perfect formula. We gave our students a “menu” of four assignments that had to be completed by the end of the week, and then we gave them time at the beginning of each class to work through the activities at their own pace. We gave students 10–15 minutes, but if we were teaching summer school, we’d likely increase that to 20–30 minutes.

TOuch-Typing Practice

Create classes on Typing Club (teacher accounts are free and allow you to track student progress), and assign students to complete a set number of lessons each week. If your students are anything like ours, they’re terrible at touch typing. After years of watching them struggle to type final drafts, we decided we’d had enough. Students enjoyed the activity, and it’s a life skill they’ll really benefit from.

Grammar Practice

Create classes on Quill (also free) for weekly grammar practice. Students start by taking a diagnostic test, and then you assign them their own personalized set of lessons, based on the skills they need practice on. Covering proofreading, grammar rules, and sentence-combining, Quill’s lessons require students to type full sentences (reinforcing their typing practice) and provide instant feedback about errors, not letting them advance until they’ve made the appropriate corrections. Quill has also added Reading with Evidence lessons that would be fantastic reinforcement for students retaking English in summer school.

Literary elements and devices includes definitions, examples, and two exam options. Access to 5 Kahoot reviews. 115+ terms. Image of laptop screen with "literary terms to know" list.

Literary Devices and Elements Practice

Assign Kahoots to review key literary terms. If your school, like ours, has a set vocabulary program, you could easily use those words instead, but if you don’t (or you’re just looking for something ready-made), we’ve got a series of five Kahoots that review the most essential literary terms students need to be successful in higher-level English courses. While intended for PreAP and AP students, the terms are beneficial to students at every level.

First Chapter Friday Activities

Assign First Chapter Friday Nearpods. We started creating First Chapter Friday Nearpods during the pandemic to introduce our students to high-interest YA novels. Students found them engaging, so when we returned to school in-person, we continued including them as part of our weekly assignment menu. If you subscribe to our monthly First Chapter Friday Nearpods list, you’ll get five First Chapter Friday Nearpods in your email every month that you can assign to your students. If we were teaching summer school, we’d probably assign one each day of the week—who says book recommendations can only happen on Fridays?!

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Prioritize Independent Reading

We all know that what our students, especially our struggling students, need most is time and encouragement to read. When you’re teaching summer school, you typically have the same students for multiple hours each day. Why not devote some of that time to independent reading in an effort to remind students that reading can be a valuable way to relax and recharge? Turn on some relaxing music (visual bonus: the European scenery is gorgeous) and give students time to read in class each day. The best part? You get to do some summer reading yourself!

In addition to the First Chapter Friday Nearpods we mentioned above, we’ve got a variety of resources to help make independent reading work in your classroom:

We post weekly YA book recommendations on our website to share contemporary YA books from a variety of genres. We prioritize representation and inclusion, and we do quite a bit of research to keep you informed on the most recent (and engaging) books the industry is buzzing about.
Our favorite strategy for holding students accountable for their independent reading is this simple Reading Check-In form. We’ve included questions for fiction, nonfiction, and ones that apply to both, and the questions are structured to encourage students to develop thought processes that help them informally reflect on their reading. In our own classrooms, we assigned the forms on a rotation, limiting ourselves to 5–8 students submitting per week so we could take the time to thoughtfully engage with students about their reading, leading to more of a conversation than an “evaluation.”
Make independent reading a more significant part of your summer school curriculum by assigning students to complete our favorite end-of-novel project as a culminating project at the end of each “semester.” We explain the assignment in detail here, but it’s a fun activity with creative elements that still requires students to engage in literary analysis (sneaky, we know!).

If this all sounds amazing to you, save a few dollars and get our Independent Reading bundle, which includes both the Reading Check-In form and the novel flip book activity, and as a bonus, you’ll get a set of reading-themed classroom posters.

Ease In and Set Expectations

Image of sample resource pages from Disney Pixar theme activity.

You want your first few assignments to be engaging but also introduce key skills your students will need to be successful. No matter what grade you’re teaching, a mini-unit that reviews the criteria for good theme statements, requires students to support those theme statements with evidence from the text, and introduces an analytical paragraph structure will align with your content standards. It will also help students be successful in future English classes, making it, in our opinion, time well-spent.

If you purchased our Back to School bundle, then you already have our best-selling Disney Pixar theme activity. Students review the criteria for good theme statements, and then they practice identifying and/or writing theme statements for “Piper,” “La Luna,” “Bao,” and “Lou.” The activity was always a hit in our classrooms, and the clearly stated guidelines increased the quality of students’ theme statements.
After the Pixar theme activity, we recommend using our favorite lesson of the year. Students watch The LEGO Batman Movie, complete guided viewing assignments to trace Batman’s change throughout the movie, and then write a structured analytical paragraph explaining how his change reveals the film’s theme. We’ve even included a multiple-choice test, which most of our students found to be an easy A! You’ll find this activity valuable not only because it’s a highly engaging review of theme, but because the 5C paragraph format introduced in this lesson is used in many of our other materials. (If you didn’t purchase the Back to School bundle, you can purchase the two theme activities in a bundle.)

Engage Your Students With a Couple Major Texts

While you may have specific school or district guidelines to follow when it comes to the full texts you teach, we have three highly engaging units we think would work perfectly in summer school and are likely a different approach to work students completed (or did not complete, as the case may be) during the school year.

The Odyssey

Our most popular full-text unit goes with Homer’s Odyssey, and we had a lot of fun teaching it. We’ve got a couple different options for you, depending on your students’ level: one that focuses on the hero’s journey (an option we suggest for PreAP students) and another that focuses on the difference between the Homeric hero and modern heroes (designed for standard-level students). We think The Odyssey makes a great option for summer school because it’s engaging (and helpful in building students’ cultural toolkits) and covers a broad range of content standards and literary analysis skills. You’ll get all the materials for both options, and the unit comes with:

An introduction to Greek mythology that includes a list of common mythological allusions, two Kahoot challenges, three introductory Edpuzzle assignments, a colorful hero’s journey infographic, an assignment reviewing the hero’s journey with Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, an allusions test, and an on-demand writing prompt.

Note: If you need to teach your students about the hero’s journey, but are wary of tackling it with materials designed for PreAP students, you could absolutely use the materials for Percy Jackson to check that off your list and focus on the difference between the Homeric hero and modern hero with The Odyssey.

Introductory activities centered on either the Homeric Hero vs. the Modern Hero or the Hero’s Journey archetype
Access to introductory Edpuzzles about the text and ancient Greek ideals
Guided Reading Questions for excerpts that span the text (and summaries for the skipped sections) based on Emily Wilson’s highly readable translation
Creative Instagram and storyboard assignments to break up the reading
Structured materials guiding students through an analytical essay (two different options)
A final multiple-choice exam (including a review Kahoot)

Julius Caesar

You might think we’re crazy when we recommend our Julius Caesar unit for summer school, but hear us out! Julius Caesar is one of Shakespeare’s more straightforward plays, allowing students to tackle the challenge of Shakespearean language without the complicated storylines of Hamlet or the comedies. There are plenty of rich opportunities for literary analysis, and high school students are interested in a story about Caesar’s bestie literally stabbing him in the back. And, we’ve created an engaging unit from a crime investigation angle to engage students and make the text feel more relevant to modern audiences. The unit comes with everything you’ll need for:

An introductory activity in which students review criminal investigation vocabulary, watch an episode of the TV show Psych, and complete a crime report and business letter to the judge that introduce them to the activities they’ll be doing later in the unit
Guided Reading questions based on the original text OR (our recommendation for summer school) Leon Garfield’s prose version of the text in Shakespeare Stories
An engaging and interactive crime report activity
Structured materials guiding students through the process of writing a business letter arguing that Brutus should be remembered as either “the noblest Roman of them all” or a traitor to the Roman republic
A multiple-choice final exam
You may want to supplement the unit with our Introduction to Shakespeare Escape Room. The five-part escape room is perfect for the long classes of summer school, and it comes with an activity that introduces students to Shakespeare’s language through one of his sonnets.

Dear Martin

This isn’t our unit, but it’s one we purchased on TPT and used in our own classrooms. It’s Lit Teaching’s unit is a great option for teaching Nic Stone’s Dear Martin, and our students were highly engaged with the text and Heather Cianci’s materials. The novel is a fantastic read that introduces students to many of the issues surrounding discussions of race in America today, and the unit includes introductory activities and journals that get students to think deeply about the content in an informal way. If you’re looking for a contemporary read, Dear Martin is a great choice, and It’s Lit Teaching’s activities are perfect for summer, when you’re trying to engage reluctant students.

Engaging Mini-Units and Lessons to Fill in Gaps (or for Especially Reluctant Learners)

Optimistic as we English teachers can be, there are groups for whom lengthy texts are just NOT going to work. And that’s okay. If you have one of those classes that you just know is not going to make it through a full novel or play, we have engaging resources that move faster and still require students to read, write, and think critically (at least a little bit).

These would also be great resources if you want to include an engaging mini-unit or lesson between each major text, or if you have to teach your district’s curriculum but have some gaps to fill in.

Even if you don’t teach The Odyssey or Julius Caesar in full, you can do the introductory mini-units with your students. All students can benefit from a review of the hero’s journey and Greek mythology with Percy Jackson, and our crime report and investigation with Psych was one of our students’ favorite assignments. It’s fun, but it also allows them to practice supporting claims with evidence, structured analytical writing, and the business letter format.
Have students complete the Introduction to Shakespeare Escape Room even if you don’t read a play. They’ve likely heard of Shakespeare before and are likely to encounter him again in future classes, so why not have some fun problem-solving while picking up useful information?
Review the elements of plot with our Plot Elements and Plot Diagram unit plan. Students practice making plot diagrams for three Disney Pixar shorts (“Feast,” “Lava,” and “Paperman”) and review plot elements with an episode of Modern Family. Then they complete Guided Reading Questions for Frank Stockton’s “The Lady, or the Tiger?” and take a quiz. The unit also includes a list of key literary terms and a related Kahoot challenge.

Parts of Plot an alternative plot diagram illustration of mountain scene. Includes definitions for exposition, complications, climax, and resolution.

Assign students to write a fictional narrative (or two). Our fictional narrative unit comes with two prompts, one based on an image and another based on an excerpt from a novel, and includes everything you need to guide your students through the writing process, including mini-lessons on using dialogue and writing sensory details. Based on our experience, you’ll enjoy reading them.
Teach your students traditional business letter format by assigning them to write a letter of complaint. This quick and easy writing activity introduces students to a real-world skill while allowing them to do one of their favorite things: complain! The lesson includes everything you’ll need, including the option to score with a detailed or holistic rubric. Note: If you do the Psych lesson or Julius Caesar unit, we’d probably skip this one.
Many of our units introduce students to the 5C analytical paragraph structure—claim, concrete evidence, context, commentary, connection—but if you need a generic writing prompt that uses this format and can be applied to any text, we’ve got you covered with this characterization-focused prompt.
While we probably wouldn’t use our unit that teaches integrating, citing, and punctuating quotations correctly in MLA format for summer school since it’s something we tended to focus on more with our PreAP students, it can make a big difference in your students’ writing. The unit includes student-friendly reference materials, practice activities, and a quiz. If you work through this early in the summer, it’s something you can hold your students accountable for in many of our other materials as well.

If you have the flexibility to build your own curriculum while teaching summer school, we’ve got more than enough here to reinforce valuable skills with your students for the whole summer. Even if you have to follow a set curriculum, we’ve got some highly engaging lessons that will hopefully bring a little fun and light heartedness to attending class in the summer. Either way, we hope you’re not reinventing the wheel: you need to recover from the school year, too!

What else do you need? We’re here to support busy teachers like you, and we’d love to know what other resources you need to make teaching summer school a better experience. Reach out to us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works to connect with us!

Teaching Summer School? We’ve Got You Covered.