Making the Most of Summer

City Kids kicked off its 2020 virtual summer program season with a Zoom ceremony on Saturday, June 13th that gave an overview of upcoming virtual Summer Programs and honored our graduating Seniors JETs (12th grade participants). We reviewed all the amazing programs completed in-person and virtually during the school year in DC and then covered virtual summer program activities for all cohort levels. We also celebrated each Senior JET by presenting them with a word cloud of attributes as collected by CK staff and participants.

We developed virtual summer programs that will occur between Monday, June 15th- Friday, July 31st. The virtual summer program includes:

• 6-weeks of virtual program offerings for each youth; camper programs offered from June 15th-July 24th and JET programs offered from  June 22nd-July 31st. 
• Camper and “All City Kids” programs include;
  • Daily reflection journal & video stream
  • Daily movement class, including fitness, yoga, and dance.
  • Special events on Fridays
  • Weekly facilitated mindfulness by Heart Refuge Mindfulness Community.
• Each program level at City Kids has cohort specific weekly content and a theme week during the 6-week program.  
• Additional curriculum components this summer include a public lands component based on curriculum from the Wilderness Project and add on content from the 1619 Project.  
• JET programs operate in accordance with the DC SYEP schedule and operations.  JET can participate in up to 25 hours of paid programming per week.  Programming is a combination of live programs and self-led virtual learning.  JETs remain in their tracked JET programs, JCL, Intern or Career Exploration program and have “All JET” programs. 

 In addition to programs following existing City Kids Curriculum, we’ve been utilizing The 1619 Project Curriculum for our 7th grade and high school  participants and The Wilderness Society’s “Public Lands Curriculum” for all camper level participants (7th-9th grade). The 1619 Project Curriculum challenges us to reframe U.S. history by marking the year when the first enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil as our nation’s foundational date. The project developed a curriculum with activities to engage youth of all ages in learning about this history. The TWS Curriculum focuses on building an understanding that includes recognizing the fact that “public lands” were Indigenous lands long before the United States became a nation. In addition, the curriculum describes the decisions made to protect public lands and places those decisions in the broader historical and social context in which they were made.