High school

Preparing the Senior High Student for College and Beyond

June 23, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

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As your child enters senior high, a whole new world is going to open up to them. Puberty, being on the cusp of adulthood, and the countdown to college years has begun. However, a parent needs to guide their child through these years with tact and discipline. Many kids find that as they reach their senior year, their desire to stay focused is lessened. A parent has to do what they can to help maintain focus.

About midway through senior high, kids are faced with decisions to make. This is the time to start looking into colleges as well as figure out what field they want to study in. Grades need to be kept up, loans and grants are going to have to be applied for, and most likely part-time work is going to be sought out. All of these issues combine into one gigantic wad of stress for parents and children alike.

The key to surviving these years intact is to find a balance. Grades are the first and foremost important issue. A lesser grade makes or breaks the ability to get into the school of a teenager’s dreams. So while they may want to work in order to have money, you as the parent need to decide if work should win out over grades. Certainly supporting a teenager’s newfound habits are on the expensive side, but no one said children are cheap.

Ultimately you will do what makes the most sense for your family situation. However, no matter how much a teenager will tick you off, support them in whatever they do because they still need you.

Filed Under: Students Tagged With: Adolescence, High school, Parent

Dealing with the Tween Years of Junior High

June 16, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

Image by cseeman via Flickr

A child reaching junior high is on the cusp of the first big change in his life. Sixth grade is probably the last year of sanity before puberty strikes, bringing with it many changes. A parent needs to exercise great patience in order to get through the tumultuous years.

Up until this point, it was easy for the student to focus on their school work without much distraction. The hormones still haven’t set in and life tends to be much simpler. However, once puberty starts in, the ability to focus on schoolwork starts becoming trickier. The temptations to distraction need to be battled, especially considering that the junior high years can make or break the student’s chances to get into a top high school. And even in systems where there is only one high school to funnel into, study habits need to be formed at this stage to overcome the next set of changes.

This is the stage of life where parents need to sit down with their children and have frank talks with them. Their child’s world is changing, and if there is no parental context, it can be a confusing time. The major issue to deal with is the fact that emotions go all over the map at this point. Having a talk about the consequences of their actions is extremely important.

Eventually, this too shall pass as it has for untold number of tweens. Parents that do their due diligence by working and talking with their children survive intact, as do their kids.

Filed Under: Education, Learning Activities & Games Tagged With: High school, Middle school, Parent

How to Choose the Right High School for Your Child

March 20, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

If you’ve recently moved to a new area and high school will be in session again in two short months, it would be advisable to decide where your child will be attending in a timely manner. Keep in mind what you value most with your child’s education. You might want to consider what your son or daughter enjoys as well.

While academic reports might lack importance for the student body, moms and dads typically like to get a glimpse of what the curriculum may entail. Many people want to be sure their children will be intellectually stimulated in the classroom. Some parents may even decide to discuss grade point averages (in general) and ongoing testing to further ensure that students are challenged. We’ve all had to do things we didn’t like in school, but that doesn’t mean learning should be a total snooze.

Instead of watching your child admire other renowned sports figures you can inquire about sports offered at the high school’s campus. Some students enjoy the concept of running around like maniacs on the field playing lacrosse, football, basketball, baseball, soccer and golf. Of course every team needs a cheerleader. Some of us view sports in a negative fashion while others are open-minded.

With tomorrow creeping up on us, it might be best to enroll your future high school student in a more college preparatory educational program. In many academic institutions, teachers can deduct up to a full grade for tardiness. It’s not unusual for homework to take up to five or six hours to complete- much like college course work. Since 2000, it’s become increasingly more of a commodity for many schools to place value upon community service. If your child is motivated and self assured about his or her future, there are schools that permit students to declare a major within their junior or senior year. You could wait, but why?

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: Grade (education), High school, Student

Beginning Junior High Or Middle School

December 15, 2010 By admin 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.

Filed Under: Students, Teacher Tips Tagged With: Elementary school, High school, Middle school, Student

Preparing For Standardized Testing

December 9, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

While High school can be considered some of the best days of a student’s life that rarely has little to do with their academic progress. Students know that they are expected to work hard in the classroom and because of this they often play hard outside of school. One area where your average high school student cannot afford to play around is during the preparation of any number of different standardized tests that will determine whether or not they are going on to the next phase of their education and where exactly they will continue should they want to.

The SAT and the ACT are both basically two peas from the same pod. While the requirements for attaining good scores can seem radically different they are actually quite similar in the way they measure a student’s ability to not only retain information they have learned not just in the last three years but over the entire course of their education. There are several different sections to both tests that are built to measure a student’s reading comprehension, his ability to recognize good writing and grammar from the not so good and of course math. There are also aspects of both tests that will measure whether or not a student has problem solving skills at their repertoire and to what degree these skills work in different situations.

Prepping for these tests will often seem as though you are trying to prepare for the great unknown but at the very least the books and courses that are out there to get you ready will show you not the answers on the test but hot to approach the test itself. Prepping for the ACT or SAT is more about getting your mind in the right place and practicing this technique so that when the day comes the student isn’t frozen in terror or lack of understanding.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: Education, High school, SAT, Standardized test

Feeling Confident Entering High School

December 7, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

While almost no one enters high school knowing exactly what to expect or what they should prepare for, there are some basic tenets that any prospective high school student can commit to memory in order to have an easier time of it. When entering high school you are basically entering a world that is designed to get you ready for the next step. Certainly high school in and of itself provides plenty of real world education but the main goal isn’t to have you stop on that rung of the education ladder so much as be fully prepared to step up to the next one.

The first thing you have to know when you enter high school is that there is no other grade level you can really compare 10th grade to. There are so many different and new areas of learning going on that in some ways it will indeed seem like a whole new world and it will seem like a world that you couldn’t possibly be prepared for. The main thing to remember is that while the focus on areas like history and science and math may narrow they are for the most part going to be reinforcing things you learned earlier in your education. There may not be a whole lot of backtrack in areas like science and history but you will be able to compare what you learned along the way with what you are learning now.

As far as English classes go, there will be a further emphasis on the style of writing you use. Most high school English classes will now expect you to form a hypothesis, back up that hypothesis and include a final closing argument over a longer paper than you are used to. In the end it helps to remember what you have studied before will come in handy when you are studying new topics in a new school.

Filed Under: Students, Teacher Tips Tagged With: Education, High school, Student

Middle School Education

November 14, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

: Image via Wikipedia

The final year of elementary school prepares a student to be independent and organized. Entry into the middle school years require these skills. Homework will become more extensive with assignments of at home work in various subjects. Parents can assist their children by providing homework folders and assignment books or wall calenders to use for tracking progress and staying on task. Personal responsibility should be emphasized to children attending middle school. Parents should establish rules that outline a child’s responsibilities to their middle school education. Teaching a child good time management skills will contribute to success in their school work.

The language arts program introduced to middle school students will focus on comprehension of the materials being read. Children will be introduced to classic stories and be expected to report on the reading material. The study of grammar and punctuation will include learning about nouns and adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions and other elements of sentence structure. Compositions will be written by students to support these areas of study and increase a child’s writing ability. Math learning will include geometry, algebra and introduction to statistics. Math problems will become more complicated in the middle school educational process and utilize complex word problems that require a solution.

Social studies activities will include extensive study on the history of America and world history. Students will also learn about how the United States government was established and how our governmental system works. Science studies will include the study of earth and space, life science and chemistry. Environmental science will be studied with emphasis on the impact physical life has on our environment.

The middle school years become a time of stronger peer influence on a child. Issues of bullying can introduce themselves during middle school. Parents need to be vigilent in understanding social aspects of the middle school edcuation period.

Filed Under: Students, Teacher Tips Tagged With: Education, Educators, High school, K through 12, Language arts, Middle school, Student, United States