Thread: Summer teacher in need of advice

Hello all!

During the year, I am a student at Vanderbilt University. I will be a senior in the fall. I only decided last summer that I wanted to enter the field of education, and thus, I have only taken a limited number of education courses (about 5).

This summer, I am teaching middle school reading and writing to underachieving students that have just completed the 6th grade and the 7th grade. My 6th grade group consists of 6 students, and my 7th grade group is 4 students. The program began this past week and we only have 4 weeks left. We only meet Monday through Thursday for an hour and 20 minutes. Not much time to help these kids prepare for the next grade!!

This past week began riddled with behavior problems that ate up the majority of our time, and the week ended with struggles to have the kids complete their homework. If all goes well, we won't have these problems (at least not to the same extent) for the next few weeks. With those things out of the way, I am now focused on how I can best help these students become better readers and writers in the next three weeks. I have been reading a lot about reciprocal teaching to help increase their reading skills. It seems like a highly successful program, and I am thinking that that may be my best bet. However, I am not really clear about how it would actually be executed in the classroom. I've looked at several webpages about the process. Summarizing and predicting are clear. However, questioning and clarifying are not so clear. For questioning do students create questions that they are able to answer and for clarifying they create questions that they are not able to answer? I would appreciate suggestions from anyone that has used reciprocal teaching in their classroom. Also - if anyone has any other advice about good ways to teach reading strategies to students who are largely lacking comprehension skills, I would love to hear them.

Thanks for the help!

Danielle