Are you a middle school teacher looking for immersive ways to teach your students about leadership? Or are you an after-school educator searching for creative and engaging platforms to help students build literacy? Perhaps you want to expose your students to different career paths available to them while cultivating essential 21st-century workforce skills. 

Read To Lead®️ can help with all of these, and more! Here are some ways you can integrate Read To Lead®️ into your curriculum to get students engaged, motivated and building literacy while acquiring important leadership skills.

During the School Day

Read to Lead®️ lends itself perfectly as a supplement to the core curriculum in classes such as English Language Arts, History/ Civics, and Social Studies. Each episode comes with lesson plans, worksheets, discussion questions and projects that educators can easily modify to tie in with their core curriculum. 

Prior to each session’s gameplay, educators can engage their students and set the stage for the content and concepts they will encounter in the session with the mini-lesson.

Post gameplay, educators can also choose to dive deeper into the themes of the topic just completed by engaging students in post-game discussion questions, encouraging collaborative working groups among students, or independent worksheets.

The wide variety of episodes across three interactive game platforms means educators have a wealth of resources to choose from depending on what best meets the needs of their students to enrich units within your existing courses.

Cassandra Iverson of Our Lady of Guadalupe Academy in Elizabeth, NJ uses Read To Lead®️ twice a week with her students, as an integrated part of Social Studies and STEM lessons. Educator Deja Flynn has also found great success in integrating Read to Lead®️ in her classroom to improve literacy and comprehension and develop her students’ leadership skills.

After-school Programs

For educators looking to integrate Read To Lead®️ into after-school programs, the platform offers students the chance to focus on developing their leadership skills and engage in career exploration activities. 

Outside the confines of the classroom, after-school programs can help students bridge the gap between curriculum and career. Read To Lead®️ offers students the chance, sometimes for the first time ever, to see not only the connection between what they learn in school but also the variety of professions available to them.

Ms. Oriana Pantoja’s work with Children’s Aid After-School Program is just one example of how Read To Lead®️ can be embedded into a traditional after-school program. Read to Lead®️ is tied in as part of a literacy component where students of different grade levels focus on achieving different objectives for different grade levels.

The Read To Lead®️ community projects is also an excellent supplement to any after-school program. With their wider community view, they encourage students to expand their horizons and see how their actions can have an impact on others around them. Ms. Erika Whitehead, Director of Instruction for The Catalyst Schools’ Circle Rock Charter School, finds that her students have benefited greatly from the hands-on activities, and applied the skills that they have learned to create positive change in their communities.

Vacation Programs

It is just as important to keep students reading and engaged in their learning over the vacations to avoid reading loss and ensure students are ready to tackle the challenges of returning to school after a break. Read To Lead®️ offers a specially tailored Youth Leadership Summer Program for students to hone their leadership skills in authentic workplace environments.

Offering two immersive workplace programs in the public service and medical industry, the Read to Lead®️ Summer Program helps students build 21st-century skills essential to career readiness. The culminating project transfers their leadership skills into a service-learning project and also ensures that students reduce reading loss over the long break from school.

With just a little careful planning, Read to Lead®️ can easily be integrated into your classroom curriculum for your students to reap a world of benefits. How are you using Read To Lead®️ in your daily school curriculum, as part of an after-school program, or over the vacations? We’d love to hear from you on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram or join our Educator Community for more resources!