• What is so different about Scholastic’s After School Learning Package from the numerous products other companies are selling into the Out-of-School-Time environment?
• Scholastic is the first company to blend ultra-creative content—in a variety of media—with a fundamentally sound, research-based, and easy-to-implement curriculum. Scholastic, known across the globe for its award-winning books, video, and online resources, brings all of these entities together with creative and fun lesson plans and activities focusing on literacy in the core content areas.
• A lot of companies approach after school programs like ours with learning solutions and materials designed for the classroom. However, we are staffed with instructors without formalized teacher training, making these products difficult at best to implement. How will the Scholastic After School Learning Program make it easier for our instructors to motivate and provide students with an authentic learning experience?
• Scholastic has developed an After School program expressly for After School instructors, taking into account the need for an easy-to-implement program to create a successful learning environment. We designed our curriculum, based on raising comprehension through student enrichment and engagement, with the After School instructor in mind.
  
  The Scholastic After School team spent 18 months talking to After School leaders and administrators in order to ascertain their most pressing needs. What we learned was that program leaders had the challenge of training a pool of instructors who had a variety of backgrounds and experience. We have learned that the greatest challenge for most After School programs is providing their instructors with the tools and training they need to successfully implement the program curriculum. We crafted our offering to specifically address that challenge, to enable students to participate and benefit from a meaningful learning experience with positive learning outcomes.
  
  This doesn’t mean that teachers won’t benefit: many professional teachers don’t want to have to “reinvent the wheel” when they leave their regular job to teach an After School program. They will appreciate all the resources and materials available to them, combined with the easy-to-implement lesson plans and activities.
• How many children, or how large a program does the $7500 package serve?
• It depends on your program’s needs and objectives, but the most appropriate number of students served per package should range from 150 to 200. If you have that number of students distributed over two or three sites, your local Scholastic sales representative will work with you to plan how best to allocate the package’s resources.
• I really like your program, but can’t afford the $7500 price tag. Are there any alternatives for me and my After School program?
• Although we recommend you purchase our package, because of all the great resources and materials it contains, we do provide customers with other options. You can choose from our 26 themed sets, spanning elementary and middle schools, and ranging in price from $850-$1150 (5 titles, 10 copies of each, with lesson plans and activities). You can also purchase the different components of our $7500 package separately, a la carte, if you choose.
• Will my program need extra books if I want to do a more mediated, group-led literacy lesson? If so, what do I need to do?
• We intentionally left it up to you, the program administrator, to decide on which books in which core content areas you want to focus. We believe strongly that the appeal of our program is in the ability to customize it, to best meet the subjective needs and objectives of each program. Scholastic’s After School Learning Program offers an array of different packages and options, allowing you to choose which books you would like to add, at a reasonable price. Your sales representative will work with you to customize which titles and how many of each you will need to successfully run your group literacy sessions.
• What kind of assessments do you provide to allow me to ascertain if the program is actually enhancing students’ reading skills?  
• Each lesson plan begins with a series of learning objectives. These learning objectives are derived from state standards. There are before, during, and after reading activities and projects. Each of these activities has been created in order for the student to demonstrate mastery of a specific skill. Each of our lesson plans ends by reviewing the skills/competencies that each student should have mastered.
  
  Please see our Activity Assessment Grid, a terrific tool for helping instructors assess and articulate student progress and outcomes.
• Is the curriculum correlated to my state’s standards?
• Yes. Scholastic looked at between a dozen and two dozen sets of state standards and took the most prevailing standards that pertain to Reading/English Language Arts and whatever subject area the related book covers: science, math, or social studies for example. For example, one of our titles profiles the great Italian artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci. Students who read our book “Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Artists” about da Vinci will learn not only about art and artistic expression, but about history/social studies as well.
• I need to deliver engaging lessons and activities in core content areas like science, social studies, and math. How will your program help me do that?
• This goes to the heart of why the Scholastic After School Learning Program is so effective. Yes, the program stresses enhanced reading comprehension through more avid participation and deeper engagement (great material that stokes their interest and wonder). But perhaps most importantly, the books and corresponding lesson plans relate to different core content areas, including history/social studies, science, math, as well as some other subjects that today’s students are missing out on during the regular school day: art, civics, and health, for example.
• I see the Scholastic After School Learning Package sells for $7500. However, I don’t have access to any computer and thus will not be able to use your Online Learning Portal. Do I have to pay for something I can’t use?
• No. Your Scholastic representative will deduct $1000 for the cost of the online piece, and you will not be charged.
• Between the hardcover books and the paperbacks, the total number of books comes to nearly 600. If I don’t have a room for these books, where am I going to put them all?
• Believe it or not, a collection of 600 books does not take up a significant amount of space, particularly the paperbacks. The books can be stored easily in approximately five plastic crates, with an average of 100-150 books per crate. The crates are not overly large and could easily be stacked into a closet.
• I am concerned about my instructors actually being able to successfully use this or any other After School program. How can you assure me that this is a curriculum that my instructors will be able to implement easily?
• During development of our After School Learning Program, Scholastic staff realized that those running After School or Extended Learning programs would hugely benefit from an easy-to-use resource that could serve as their guide. Thus Scholastic created its Instructors Guide, an A-to-Z resource explaining every aspect of the Scholastic After School Learning Program—from the books to the online component to the audio listening center to the lesson plans. It’s all there, using a hands-on approach that any instructor will find useful.
• I really like your package, but I’m not certain whether my program should do the training. What will the training do that your Instructors Guide and training manual won’t?
• We highly recommend that you enlist your instructors for training in the implementation of the Scholastic After School Learning Program. The training is priced at $2000/day with a capacity of 20 seats. The training is a full day and the Scholastic After School Trainer covers virtually everything that your instructors will need to know, from technique, to provoking and facilitating discussion with students to stimulate critical thinking, setting up and running the project-based activities, working with small groups, etc. Each training participant gets a copy of our Scholastic After School Learning Program Training Guide, a terrific resource that they will be able to refer back to often for guidance, tips, and ideas on how to maximize their students’ reading and learning experiences.