Ever wonder what the middle school teachers receiving your graduates really want?
Not sure how best to help your 4th, 5th, and 6th graders transition from primary to secondary grades? I’ll let you in on a secret: We middle school teachers are equally concerned about helping kids learn how to “be students” as we are with the content knowledge that they have when they arrive.
For example, I work in a K-8 building by day and tutor high school students by night, so I spend a lot of time with students who are in transition: watching the 5th/6th students get ready to join my 7th grade homeroom, helping my 8th graders get ready for high school, and prepping juniors and seniors with the college admissions process. If there’s one issue that students in K-12 have in common during a time of transition, it’s this: study skills.
At all points in the journey, our students need explicit instruction on how to adjust to the next level of their academic careers…
(All of this in addition to raging hormones, social issues, and extracurriculars. Whew!)
Don’t worry – we middle school teachers know that the 6th and 7th grades are scary.
We expect students to have a learning curve with lockers, changing classrooms, organizing binders, and exams. We’re prepared to deal with friend drama, new academic rigors, and even puberty.
But there are few things that primary teachers could do that would really, really help us out.
With whatever precious minutes you have to spare, give your students these five things to prep for middle school:
Transitioning from the primary grades to middle school is a challenging thing to do for many students.
This secondary teacher gives five tips on ways to prepare students for middle school. Teaching them these skills and habits makes them that much more prepared!
Planners, assignment books, and calendars need to be completed daily and independently by students, and they are the fastest way to help parents know what their children should be doing. Using your calendar method of choice, please help them learn how to record not just when something is due, but what they could do TONIGHT to work ahead, study, or prepare. Breaking down bigger tasks into smaller pieces is one of the toughest skills that we have to work on in middle school, and we appreciate if you fight the good fight along with us!
(Bonus points to you if you’ve got an online calendar for students to double-check their homework from anywhere, like we often do in secondary, BUT make students write it down in addition to that resource. Not every future teacher will post the work for them, and there’s more to write down than just the final due date anyway!)
Transitioning from the primary grades to middle school is a challenging thing to do for many students. This secondary teacher gives five tips on ways to prepare students for middle school. Teaching them these skills and habits makes them that much more prepared!
Primary teachers are the MASTERS of teaching the writing process, and we SO thank you for it! At the same time, anything you can do to emphasize the final draft/publication step is greatly appreciated. This is particularly true if your students will be transitioning from a mastery grading scale to one with points and percentages.
(Go ahead and forewarn your students that I might take off points for formatting, grammar and spelling errors, or not following directions/prompts. Feel free to make me the bad guy.)
If you need help, 5th and 6th grade teachers might like my Interactive Editing Checklist and Task Cards set, which breaks down editing vs. revising and other strategies to make a final draft their best work.
Transitioning from the primary grades to middle school is a challenging thing to do for many students. This secondary teacher gives five tips on ways to prepare students for middle school. Teaching them these skills and habits makes them that much more prepared!
I’m so blessed to have talented K-6th grade teachers who send me passionate readers! However, with all of the competing demands of grades 7-12, students will have increasingly less free time to read for pleasure at home.
Encourage students to read at home AND at school so they don’t become dependent on solely in-class reading minutes. Help them break down longer books into page-per-night goals so their goals seem more manageable and have the accountability of smaller deadlines. (We find that page/day goals work better than just minutes-per-night goals.) Talk openly about when and how you read books, or let other students share how they pencil in reading minutes at night.
If students learn how to fit in reading at home in addition to other demands, we may truly grow a generation of lifelong readers!
I know how counter-intuitive this may sound. Right now, you might be engaged in epic battles with students regarding reporting vs. tattling, independent vs. teacher-dependent problem solving, or independent research foundations.
However, that student who asks you five million questions often comes to middle school and clams up tight, afraid to ask his intimidating new teachers for help or admit he has a problem. This problem persists into high school, when the day is even faster-paced.
Teach your students how to ask good “we” questions, when to ask “me” questions, and how to check their resources for the answer. (Or even better, revamp your business letter unit to include a How-to-Email-a-Teacher lesson. It helps the introverts and extroverts alike learn how to write a polite request for help!)
Transitioning from the primary grades to middle school is a challenging thing to do for many students. This secondary teacher gives five tips on ways to prepare students for middle school. Teaching them these skills and habits makes them that much more prepared!
My students love different the features of Quizlet to study vocabulary! …OTHER than just blankly rereading the notes. The easiest way you could help is to tell students at least two ways to study before any test or quiz.
I know one innovative 5th grade teacher who does skits and verbal sharing during class to teach kids what studying “looks” like; another uses logs and checklists so that students must prove that they have studied at least three ways before a test takes place. I use the various features of Quizlet‘s online flash cards extensively when I teach vocabulary and Greek & Latin roots!
When my team starts preparing 7th graders for their first-ever midterm exams, we help them to:
To be fair, I know that some schools have policies about homework limits, and maybe you’re busy assigning chunks of a whole-class novel (or trying to get kids to read ANYTHING at home). But to the extent that you can, do NOT let your students become wholly dependent on in-class reading time for choice novels.
The older they get, the less time we secondary teachers can give them to read at school. So if our kids only know how to read when a teacher carves out time FOR them, then they’ll never become truly independent readers who pick up a book in bedrooms, on buses, or in other quiet moments.
No surprise here: There IS such a thing as reading too quickly (without comprehending) or reading too slowly (and forgetting what happened in the story). We also know to encourage students to ALWAYS read, not taking too long to pick up the next book, and to be careful with too many books at once.
The teachers in my school lay a great foundation for student pacing guidelines, such as their suggested two-week rule for medium-length middle grade or YA novels.
In grades 5-8, I have to help kids with the next level of pacing: balancing at-home reading with homework, sports, and life. The pacing game will NOT get easier for them, and it’s helpful when I don’t have to teach these skills from scratch. To help with that, I use pacing bookmarks that teach students how to set a deadline and then calculate an appropriate rate of pages per day to meet their goals.
Reading is one of the hardest subjects and hobbies to get kids to love. So, how do we prepare primary readers for middle school and carry on the good reading habits and mindsets that it seems so many K-6 teachers instill?
I give all kinds of praise to elementary reading teachers, because you are the kings and QUEENS of book talks, author studies, genre units, and matching the right book to the right child. Your recommendations help initiate the love of reading, and you build beautiful trust relationships with students, who know that you can help them find the next awesome book.
But if we want to maintain that lifetime love, then we have to train students to find their own books. Yes, there are websites, apps, and librarians to help them when they grow up, but even that requires students to have the self-advocacy skills to:
Elementary teachers already have cool guidelines that I steal, like the “five-finger rule” or the practice of curating a “to-read list.” But what about…
In a perfect world, every time a child touches a book should make him or her smile. While we won’t convert EVERY child to reading, there are some indicators I hope to see in my middle schoolers before they graduate to ninth grade and beyond, and I think they apply to elementary also.
I love seeing students who:
Despite the requests for backup listed above, we really do think that primary and middle grades teachers are fabulous. Working in a K-8 building has only deepened my appreciation for the tears, germs, and sweat that go into a day of teaching younger students, and I salute you.
At the end of the day, we will be grateful for your students and the work you put into their success. Even if you only start these battles, we will happily jump in and end the war!
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