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The Education Distinction: Junior High and Middle School

May 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Central Middle School in Quincy, Massachusetts. 

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It’s an easy certainty: the ideas are interchangeable; the concepts are the same. Junior high and middle school are identical principles, you believe. There are no distinctions between them, just the casual trade of their names.

This is incorrect.

Junior high is not the same as middle school, just as middle school is not the same as junior high. They are instead two separate formats: each with their own rules and requirements. It’s imperative to recognize this, if only to discontinue the assumptions.

The simplest — and most obvious — difference between these systems is their student demographics. Junior highs are defined by teens, favoring only the seventh and eighth grades (composed typically of individuals who are 13 and 14). Middle schools, however, include those who are in the sixth grade. This allows younger children to enter the educational population. This is the greatest distinction between these notions and can be traced back to their conceptions.

Junior high began as a way to bridge the distance between elementary schools and high schools. It was intended for students not yet able to enter their freshman years and was divided into more advanced academics.

This was not enough to satisfy many districts, however. The format was deemed too rigid and middle schools were formed to compensate — with younger students allowed to attend and the curriculum tailored to their needs.

And this difference remains today, with these concepts operating independently of each other (often within the same cities). They are not — and will never be — the same. This must be understood to avoid switching their names and branding them educational twins.

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Reading Expectations When Entering Elementary School

December 27, 2010 By Leave a Comment

One of the many parents worry about as their children are about to graduate from the Kindergarten level of education to grade school is what their child should know once they hit first grade and what they will learn over the course of the year. This can be a trying time in parents, especially new parents lives simply because they do not want to think that their children are somehow underprepared or behind the rest of their kids’ class. What most people don’t realize is that for the most part if the parents are spending time with the kid, reading to him or her and with him or her then their child is pretty much ready for first grade.

During first grade, one of the most important aspects of the child’s education will be determining sight words. Sight words are words that a child recognizes right away and can basically actually read. Sight words can be learned fairly easily as long as they spend kindergarten engaged and they are also practicing reading at home. Of course a first grader, especially when they first enter the grade will not be expected to recognize every word in the dictionary but they should also be able to do what is called decoding. Decoding basically means that the child is able to figure out a word they have never seen before based on familiar looks and sounds.

Again, decoding is a skill that can be learned as long as the parents are taking a concerted effort towards making sure the child is getting plenty of reading done while they are at home. Parents who work with the schools to help their kids get the best educations, parents who do not lean on the schools to be the only providers of education will see children who learn faster and more effectively.

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Navigating Trhough Grade 1

December 25, 2010 By Leave a Comment

If you are feeling a bit nervous about whether or not your child is on par with other kids when it comes to reading skills, fear not! You are not alone. Almost all parents see their little ones heading into first grade and wonder if their kids are truly prepared for the beginning of grade school. This is after all when things get real as far as educating the kids to the ways of the world and when they being their long trek (which can seem to shoot by in an instant) towards college.

In a nutshell, the thing that all first graders should be able to do is recognize sight words. This basically means that as long as you team up the reading skills they have learned in kindergarten with steady practice at home there should be no problem. Of course each child learns at their own pace and if the sight words are not coming to them as quickly as you would like don’t despair. The old adage of “if at first you don’t succeed, try try again” certainly applies when it comes to young children grasping the art of reading.

Sight words are exactly what they sound like they would be. These are words that your youngster can actually recognize just by looking at them. Usually at this grade level they will be very simple words and no one should be getting nervous because giraffe or xylophone are registering as sight words for your first grader. Of course the more sight words your child knows the better for their long term development but as long as they have some arrows in that quiver they will be well on their way to progressing as they should through the new mine field that is elementary school in today’s culture.

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Meeting the First Grade Expectations

December 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

When children enter the first grade their parents can often feel as though they are frozen by the fear that their child is not yet ready to enter grade school. After all grade school is basically the beginning of the end of their children’s education and while college can seem a long ways off it can also seem fairly close when you really do the math. First grade is the first of just 12 different levels until they head off into the real world and for most parents that 12 years can seem like it flies by in the blink of an eye.

So what should parents know about how much their kids need to be prepared? When it comes to reading their child should have some basic words, known as sight words in their repertoire. This means that there should be at least some words they can recognize in print by just a glance. Decoding will also be done in the first grade, which means that while the child will not know the first right off the bat, they will be able to decipher what the word is thanks to its proximity to other words they already know. Sounding out is a helpful tool when talking about decoding in reading.

As far as writing goes, again there should be several words the child can write with varying degrees of success. Writing a letter the wrong direction is perfectly normal by a first grader, but as the year goes on the letters in which they have problems with should be rarer and rarer. It helps most parents to understand that at first it may seem like their child is lagging behind the class. This is normal as most kids will have initial struggles. Victory is achieved when their child learns from their mistakes and is able to correct them as the year wanes on.

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What To Expect When You Are Expecting a First Grader

December 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Entering the first year of grade school can be an intimidating task for both the child and the child’s parents. Knowing exactly what is expected can sometimes seem more difficult than it needs to be and most parents in the know understand that somewhere a school will tell you exactly what they want the student to know and what they expect the student to learn. Schools don’t want what they expect of the child to be a secret. They understand that the best way for the child to learn much of anything will be by working in concert with the parents and so they want the parents well armed.

As far as reading goes, most school have basic guidelines set up in which they expect the children to be able to recognize some words in their reading right away. These words are not going to be the more difficult words in the vocabulary by any stretch but if your child can’t recognize a word like “cat” then it may be time to buckle down and figure out why.

As far as writing goes, again the school is not expecting your child to write the treaty of Versailles but they should be able to write their own name as well as several other basic words. Again, the inability to write cat or dog should be an alarm that it is time to sit down with the child and try and figure out why they are having problems. Mathematics may actually be the real key to understanding where your child is compared to others. Most children at the beginning of first grade should be able to count above 30 and at times skip from 5, to 10, to 15 without much difficulty. Numbers are going to be key in this first year and a firm grasp on them can only help the child develop along the way.

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What To Expect When You Enter Grade School

December 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment

When a child enters the first year of grade school the situation can be a bit of a shock to the system. Both children and parents often feel as though they are going in a bit blind as Kindergarten was the last grade where learning seemed like sort of a bonus and being a kid was still the key to succeeding in the grade. Now in first grade kids are actually expected to be able to be real students, to complete homework and pass state mandated tests.

When dealing with the requirements of writing and reading in the first grade, there are several different requirements that need to be fulfilled when it comes to reading and writing. Children must be able to recognize certain words on sight in order to move into the first grade. While they certainly are actually increasing their vocabulary they need to be able to label certain pictures of things without much in the way of help from a teacher or other student.

Writing deals with being able to write short words like cat and dog and at the end of the year they should be able to write out short sentences. These do not need to be three pages treatises but they should be coherent sentences that a teacher or parent can read with minimal effort. Of course at this age a child might still have a problem putting a letter facing the right way and this is to be expected. What is also expected is that by the end of the year the student will be able to fix the problems that they are having writing the letter or word facing the right way. This particular problem is far more prevalent among young children than most parents realize and it must always be taken with a grain of salt.

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Preparing Parents For Grade School

December 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Many parents see their child getting ready to go to the “big kid” world of grade school and think that all the preparation and anxiety they feel is merely watching their child really beginning to grow up. The reality is that a lot of that anxiety is probably based more on the fact that the parents have very little idea of exactly what their kid is going to have to know and understand and even less idea about how to go about helping them learn.

The most effective students in any learning environment are going to be the ones who are being helped along the way by a family member. A child’s educational success, especially a young child’s educational success is going to depend heavily on just how much support they are receiving from their parent or parents. There are a couple of steps any good parent can work on that will help their child get everything they can out of the school experience.

The first steps are making sure that your child is not trying to learn everything in the span of a couple of hours. While there are some who claim that cramming in college is the only way to go, it doesn’t work at the elementary school level. Young children should be learning as they go, not all at once. Another factor is to make sure that your child knows that you are engaged and interested in how they are doing in school. A child who has parents who quiz them on a daily basis about how school went and what sort of homework they have is bound to do better than the student who’s parents are too busy watching survivor to ask. Parents need to prepare themselves for grade school as well and that means knowing what will make the learning process easier for their child.

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What to Expect in 2nd Grade

December 15, 2010 By Leave a Comment

While most parents feel as though beginning first grade is the most difficult transition their child will go through in the grade school years, those parents are underselling just how much more competitive and challenging the second year of grade school can really be. Some teachers will tell you that while first grade is all about learning how to learn, second grade is when students really start being held accountable for the actual things they learn. This means that while knowing how to spell some basic words and phrases may have passed for acceptable in the first year of grade school, in the second year the education is all about applying those words and phrases as well as learning more about the world around them.

As far as reading and writing go, second graders must become even more versed in the art of decoding. This means that even if there are words that they cannot spell right off the bat, they must make a concerted and realistic effort to be able to write or read them after some comparisons to other words they are more familiar with. While this does not seem all that difficult at first glance it is a skill that is both difficult to master and one that most children are resistant to at first.

Common abbreviations also come into play in the second year of grade school. Teachers will expect students to have memorized or at least committed a large portion of common abbreviations to memory. These abbreviations include those for proper titles such as Dr. and Mr. as well as for the months in the year and days in the week.

While all of these rules can seem a bit overwhelming to parents of children just realizing what they have to deal with it is important to remember that a school’s number one goal is to make sure the student is learning.

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Beginning Junior High Or Middle School

December 15, 2010 By Leave a Comment

If parents thought that having their child start grade school was stressful they haven’t seen anything yet when it comes to beginning middle school or Junior High. In comparison, most students are going to see a dramatic change in the amount of homework they will be expected to take home and complete each day as well as brand new areas of study they haven’t really prepared for at all even in the sixth grade.

Middle school or Junior High is basically when a child really start preparing for the rigors of college or the real world and it is witnessed in the amount of work and the range of work a student is expected to take on. Seventh grade is where most students are first really introduced to a foreign language. While for the most part, Spanish and French are the two most popular language courses offered some schools go above and beyond as they see the world shrinking all the time and offer Asian dialects such as Chinese or even a dead language such as Latin. These are generally preliminary teachings that are geared towards softening the ground when students will have to spend at least two total semesters learning a foreign language in High school.

Seventh graders will also take on much more difficult concepts in the area of math. Seventh graders will begin studying such terms as mean and median and mode as well as other statistical investigations. Solving equations that include a variable as well as understanding the degrees involved in an angle are also going to be included in a seventh grader’s curriculum.

Finally, while a student had some education in history when they were in grade school, middle school will focus the attention on certain spans in history including the middle ages and some of the early parts of our modern history.

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Acclimating To Seventh Grade

December 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Education, when talking about the grade school years truly is a mixed bag. It seems that every year a student is tasked with absorbing even more information into their brains while making sure they are retaining what was already there. This prospect becomes especially difficult when a student hits the seventh grade because in the eyes of most school boards and school administrations, this is a time when the student is really supposed to be showing exactly what they are made of. This is the time when students are supposed to grow as people and take on an even broader range of new facts, and figures.

In seventh grade, a student goes from needing to know basic sentence structure and paragraph form and actually needs to be able to put a short report together. In the broadest sense, a seventh grader will usually be able to keep the bullet of being able to write a paper that takes up more than one page in their arsenal. One page reports are a thing of the past once you hit middle school and that is one of the hardest things to adjust to for most students.

Math also becomes more difficult, as they learn more about how to calculate angles and equations that are far more difficult than just dealing with remainders and the basic multiplication tables. Science too is introduced full bore. No more dabbling with seeing whether an egg will break at a certain velocity. Now it is time to explain what bases and acids are as well as why they interact and how they interact. Finally, Art and music; which are two areas that are incorporated early on in a child’s education lose their abstract feel and instead a student is expected to know and understand the finer points of that field. It can be a stressful time for a young teen and parents would be well advised to remember that.

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