This summer I spent the month of July working with high school students in an extended school year program at a private out of district placement school. Working with 25 teenagers, in the summer, every day, can be challenging to say the least. I co-teach a class of sophomores, and teach a class of juniors and seniors.
We’re currently on day 16 of 20 in ESY, and I would love to share some ideas on how to keep students motivated.
Allow them to listen to music. This is by far the best thing to keep kids calm and somewhat on task. Students in my program are allowed to use Chromebooks to listen to music on Youtube while they work. As long as they are not singing, dancing, rapping, or blasting their music, I’m quite happy with this arrangement.
Allow them to help choose materials. My program requires students to write a book report during summer school. Since we only have 20 days, we’ve been using short stories instead of teaching a novel. This has been super helpful because of vacations, field trips, etc. The first day I told my students the plan and asked for their input. One of the kids actually requested “Lamb to the Slaughter”, so we incorporated that into the curriculum. Students were definitely more engaged with reading and discussing this text.
Utilize film versions of texts. I have always been a huge fan of showing movies or TV shows then teaching, so I continued this in my ESY classes. In the three classes, we read “All Summer in a Day”, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, and “Lamb to the Slaughter”, which all have a movie/short film.
Personally, I think the film versions for “All Summer in a Day” and “Lamb to the Slaughter” are great adaptations that help students with reading comprehension. “All Summer” is super heavy on figurative language, so it was a little overwhelming for some of students. The film version really clarified the setting for them.
Walter Mitty is a full length movie that is very slightly similar to the short story. Walter does have daydreams quite frequently, but that’s the only similarity.
Be flexible. We have about a field trip a day, so I’m constantly losing kids to trips. Some students don’t want to participate with the field trips, so they see me every day. In these cases I work with kids individually to assign them work. For instance, my one student finished the book report, so she brings in a book from home to read. She sits in class every day, reads, listens to music and tells me about something that happened in her reading.
Since I know kids love to use the Chromebooks, I always make sure to have some vocabulary words ready to go for them to define. It’s super easy for them and they can listen to music while staying on task. I also make sure to have a couple of back up reading passages with questions for students to work on as well.
However, even with all of these tips, my classes are far from perfect. I still have students show up late, ask for food, walk out of class, and refuse to do their required book report. However, I’ve learned that incorporating these tips can help these situations and help keep my students calm.
Little Reading Coach 