RISE Summer Program
Lavinia Group's RISE Summer School Program offers ready-to-use instructional materials and high-quality professional development prior to and throughout your summer school program.
Frequently Asked Questions
Rapidly improving student reading and math skills during summer school may seem challenging, but two years of data and research has proven it is possible. RISE Summer School is a nationally recognized summer program that has proven to accelerate student learning in Math and ELA. A study conducted by the Indiana Department of Education found that students participating in RISE Summer School made statistically significant gains on the end-of-year state assessment, above pre-pandemic rates of growth. This turnkey program provides leaders and teachers with everything they need to implement a high-impact summer school program.
We have added an additional Math Routines curriculum for this summer. This 30-minute math block will build studentsʼ conceptual understanding and procedural fluency, and provide teachers with resources to address a wide variety of key grade-level content.
We do not provide a dedicated curriculum for summer school enrichment. However, we have partnered with a research-based and free-to-use platform that provides daily activities to build classroom relationships. If you are partnering with an additional enrichment company this summer, we recommend that they have clear lesson plans with sequenced activities to ensure all students are engaged during instructional time.
Teachers will need access to a computer device in order to access our RISE Summer School platform. This learning management system will serve as the central repository for teachers to access their curriculum and professional development courses this summer. Student technology is optional for summer school, however, we recommend administering the assessments digitally.
- Insight Humanities™ Book Studies (45 Minutes/daily): This curriculum rapidly develops studentsʼ critical thinking skills, passion for reading, and ability to analyze any book they encounter. Students read, analyze, discuss, and write about highly-engaging, multicultural literature by award-winning authors.
- Close Reading for Meaning™ (45 Minutes/daily): Teachers will learn to independently access and understand complex text through a three-day cycle of reading for main idea, craft and structure, and mastery. The curriculum includes texts and aligned lesson plans.
- Systematic Phonics and Shared Poem (45 Minutes/daily): Designed so teachers can personalize instruction and target existing gaps, this curriculum includes direct, explicit, and multi-sensory routines and materials that teachers can use throughout the summer and into the school year.
- Math for Meaning™ Story Problems (45 Minutes/daily): Students develop the confidence and precision necessary to tackle any mathematical task independently while building their mastery of grade-level standards. This curriculum engages students in solving on and above grade level problems through hands-on learning and rich mathematical discourse.
- Math Routines (30 Minutes/daily): The RISE Math Routines Curriculum is designed to build studentsʼ mathematical fluency and conceptual understanding through targeted, discussion-based routines. Students build automaticity with operations and concepts while keeping the “why” behind strategies front and center.
The RISE 2023 curriculum and materials will be available to all educators in early May. Leaders and teachers will access the curriculum, professional development, and all accompanying resources through our online Summer School platform. You can find samples of our curriculum on our website.
Students in summer school receive instruction aligned to standards from the grade-level they are exiting in order to address outstanding skill gaps. Our curriculum team has selected essential priority standards for the summer in mathematics and literacy. Please refer to the standard alignment document to see the focus standards by grade-level.
Yes! We have outlined the accompanying materials in our RISE 2023 Materials List. You can also find the books through our preferred vendor, Mackin. Please reach out to us if you have any clarifying questions about what to order!
RISE Summer School is designed to accelerate student learning by ensuring all students are exposed to rich grade-level content and provided with responsive support when necessary. Our summer curriculum and professional development courses are explicitly designed to help teachers utilize appropriate scaffolds and differentiation techniques in response to student data.
Our curriculum allows students to have access to both word recognition and language comprehension strategies. Through our Phonics curriculum, students will receive explicit demonstration and practice in foundational reading skills. Through our Insight Humanities™ and Close Reading for Meaning™ curriculum, students will apply background knowledge, gain vocabulary, and make inferential meaning from a variety of text in multiple genres.
We recommend providing small group individualized instruction for students who are significantly behind grade-level. Our phonics curriculum can be used flexibility across any grade-level to support developing readers. In addition, our Math Routines curriculum can be adapted for small group instruction to support mathematical reasoning, number sense, and address outstanding content gaps.
- Controlled Texts: Geodes published by Great Minds and Wilson Language Training
- K-1: King School Kids Series published by TownsendPress
- K-3: Bebop Book Collection published by Lee & Low
- 4-8: Scholastic
Our research-based curriculum is designed to support English Language Learners in the following ways:
- Incorporate robust opportunities for group and partner discussion allowing students to practice their oral speaking skills.
- Offer phonics instruction that includes direct, explicit, sequential, and multi-the sensory routines to support foundational reading skills.
- Give students access to information in various modalities, such as text, diagrams, etc.
- Provide opportunities for students to learn and keep track of content-area vocabulary. Teach students how to organize their thinking visually using notebooks and, where appropriate, additional graphic organizers.
- Include partner reading and read aloud work so students are able to hear models of fluent reading and discuss their ideas with classmates.
The focus of teacher training week is to develop an aligned vision for summer school instruction and to ensure teachers have ample opportunity to plan and practice the first few lessons of their summer curriculum. Our model of professional development is highly interactive and immersive. Throughout the training, teachers will be encouraged to discuss, debate, and ask and answer questions about content and instructional practices.
- Educators participating will have 4 hours of asynchronous pre-work and 2-3 days of live virtual sessions facilitated by Lavinia Group coaches. Teachers should reference the Teacher Training Week schedule for more information on session times and days.
Lavinia Group coaches will facilitate weekly Intellectual Preparation and Student Work Study Meetings for all math and literacy teachers. Facilitators will support teachers in differentiating to meet the needs of children based on student data and student work analysis.
- For educators, these meetings provide both professional development for teachers, as well as an opportunity to ask questions about instructional practice related to the RISE curriculum.
- Each week, teachers will complete an asynchronous professional development module and then attend a live virtual workshop facilitated by a Lavinia Group coach.
- Since content workshops occur on alternate days, teachers that teach both Math and Literacy can choose to attend all workshops each week, or one workshop each week for each content.
- All meeting links will be accessible through the Summer School platform.
Session 1 Weekly Development Meeting Schedule
We recommend administering the assessments on the first and the last day of your summer school program. However, there is flexibility for make-ups or school specific adjustments. Teachers will score the constructed response questions, with support from Lavinia Group coaches, during the first development meeting of the summer school session.
All assessment questions are aligned to the standards prioritized in the RISE summer curriculum. Students are assessed on standards from the grade-level they are exiting. Please refer to the standard alignment document for additional information.
The pre- and post-assessments will be administered digitally through Edcite, an assessment platform. We recommend that assessments are administered digitally, but if needed can also be administered via pen and paper.
The assessments are designed to take between 30-45 minutes. The assessments will include a combination of both multiple choice and open-response questions (with the exception of Rising Grades 1-3 for ELA, which is open response).
Lavinia Group will provide scoring guides and aligned rubrics as well as virtual professional development instruction on how to administer and score the assessments. The assessment data will be immediately available for school leaders to analyze and for teachers to use to inform summer instruction.
All school sites will receive a data tracker that they can leverage to keep track of student reading data and math data each week. The tracker will be managed by each individual school; Lavinia Group will not manage this data centrally. Informal data points have been pre-identified by Lavinia Group and are included on the RISE Summer School Pacing Guide.
Teachers will use the Lavinia Group Rubrics for Literacy and Math to grade student work weekly. School leaders will also have access to a comprehensive dashboard on the data tracker that provides a summary of student progress towards growth goal and overall standards mastery for their specific school.
With this dynamic tracker, school leaders will have the ability to evaluate data across classes and grades as well as week-to-week throughout the program. This tracker will be available through the onlineSummer Portal.
We will provide a template to communicate summer school progress directly to families. In addition, the assessment platform, Edcite, provides student-facing reports that you can share with families.

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