similar products:
comments:
Sorry this turned into a novel… I did my student teaching and long term subbing in high school, but ended up teaching middle school. The best advice that I got was to remember that they’re not just little high schoolers, emotionally, behaviorally, or academically. They are all over the map emotionally; the drama never ends. Be prepared to deal with a lot more executive functioning issues/instruction. For example, middle schoolers are awful at time management, so plan to work in time for things like writing due dates in assignment notebooks, having checkpoints for larger assignments, etc. In general, plan for a lot more structure than in high school. Routines are your friend. By the end of 8th a lot of students are probably getting the hang of it, but developmentally middle school is a very mixed bag. I’ve found that middle schoolers still like to color, which is great for map skills. They are also easily bribed. Candy and water bottle stickers are great. The cheapest incentives that I’ve found are to let one of them press the yodeling pickle or choose a page from the book of farts. You also need to be ready to explicitly teach all those skills that you probably wished your high school students had, like taking notes, reading a map, reading a textbook, writing coherently, studying for a test, etc. In my experience teaching 7th grade, kids just don’t know how to do these things and you can be frustrated by it, but the only way to fix it is to teach students how to do them. Obviously you integrate skills with the content, but I think that the balance is different in middle school, especially when most elementary schools have little to no social studies instruction. You’re preparing them for high school social studies, so you personally are very qualified to identify what students need to know/be able to do to be successful. The feedback that we get from the high school my district feeds into is that academic skills are the biggest challenge for students. So now we’re prioritizing explicitly teaching reading, annotating and different note taking methods and to do that well, you have to cut some content. We know our students are taking at least one more semester of government/civics and another year of US history in high school and we also know that no one will be slowing down to teach basic skills. So you figure out what they need for a high level overview of the time period and what needs more attention and figure out how to scaffold those skills in throughout the year.