Blogging From A to Z: Middle School Thoughts on Monday

Middle school can be a difficult time for homeschoolers. Your child is not in elementary school anymore and doesn't need as much handholding, but they are not in high school yet and are not ready to be totally independent in their learning. They want to do things independently, yet they still need some scaffolding in their daily work. They can also be a bit grumpy at times since this age group is typically going through puberty, with all of the hormones and mood swings that accompany it!

Silas in the middle

Middle school can also be a wonderful time for homeschoolers. You have this extra time with your pre-teen and teenager that you would miss out on if they were in public school. You can offer them the help they may need, the one-on-one time that is invaluable for kids of all ages. You can cater to your child's interests and feed their curiosity about different topics. 

7th grade workload

One of the things I always try to remind myself of is that my middle-schoolers are in a big transition stage, not just in school but in life. They are outgrowing many of their childish behaviors and hobbies and at the same time trying to see where they fit in the world of teenagers. They may still have the desire to play with toys or watch shows that are geared toward younger kids while at the same time have no desire to play with their younger siblings or do things with younger friends. They could be asking for their own phones or social media - something you may not be ready to give them.

I try to spend time with him in his environment 

Middle school can be tough - both for you and your child! Having plenty of patience and offering grace to your child (even when we think they don't deserve it) will help you both cope. Take the time to listen to your child, putting away your phone and any other distractions. Allow your child to have small "tantrums", trying to get to the root of the problem. Discuss ways to handle the larger workload in their school and try to give them as much independence as they can bear without burdening them. 

He loves to grill!

Make sure your middle-schooler is getting plenty of sleep! It's tempting to stay awake late, playing video games or watching a movie. It's recommended that children ages 6-12 get 9-12 hours of sleep a night, while children ages 13-18 need 8-10. Turning off screens an hour before sleeping also helps your child fall asleep and stay asleep. 

Most of all, enjoy this time with your middle-schooler! Play games together, go on fun fieldtrips, and laugh with (and at!) each other often. 

What’s your favorite thing about middle school?

This post is part of my series of Middle School Monday!

Link up your "M" posts this week!

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Middle School Monday - Hands-On Projects

It's Middle School Monday again, and today I'm going to be sharing about hands-on projects! Sometimes we think once our children reach middle-school age, hands-on learning is no longer relevant. This is not true, though! Middle schoolers, and even high schoolers, still benefit from hands-on projects.

Hands-on learning encourages problem-solving, critical thinking skills, and artistic expression. It gives your child a chance to experience learning. Many children retain so much more information through hands-on projects than they do through traditional methods. Hands-on projects never need to be pushed to the side; they simply transform into more complex learning experiences.

I'm going to show you a few examples of hands-on projects my middle-school age children have done. 

Pocahontas Museum

When my oldest daughter was in 7th grade, she was using America the Beautiful. One of her assignments was to create a Pocahontas Museum, and she had a blast with it! She created several "exhibits" and got very creative with them. You can read more about that here.

Messy Science Experiments

She also loved doing science experiments in 7th grade! Here is a post with a few examples. These were a chance for her to do "fun things" in the name of learning. It was always a positive experience for her to take a break from the books and impress her siblings!

Mercie is in 8th grade now, and she still gets excited when she has a fun experiment! Here she microwaved soap to see what happened.

Math Projects

Hands-on activities always make math more fun, even into middle school. When she was in 7th grade, one of her math activities was to make a simple abacus. She helped with the design and really enjoyed learning how to use it!

Art Projects

I always try to make our art projects things that will be used and treasured, not junk that we will throw away. These stained glass pictures were a lot of fun for my middle-schoolers! A lot of the "harder" art projects would be really beneficial for older kids to try out.

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Cooking 

My kids have always loved to cook. Sometimes cooking and baking are part of their school projects, but most of the time it's just a life skill they practice! My daughters can both easily put together an entire meal. In fact, I bet my boys could do the same with a little direction. They've all seen me cook and bake, been my helpers in the kitchen, and heard me talk about it enough to have a pretty good grasp on the basics.

History and Geography Projects

There is nothing that makes history come to life more than history projects! My middle schoolers have always enjoyed doing crafts, recipes, and games that teach them about history and geography. 

Diorama of the Savanah 

There are so many more types of hands-on projects your middle schoolers can do to enhance their learning. Let me know in the comments which types of hands-on projects your middle schoolers have worked on!

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Middle School Mondays - How Much Help to Give

Middle School Mondays is a new name for what used to be Jr. High Junction. I hosted this link-up years ago, but I want to get it going again. It's hard to find encouragement, ideas, and tips for homeschooling this age group. I define "middle school" as 6th-8th grades, but you may define it as something different. If you have any posts you would like to add to this link-up on Mondays, I would be so grateful! It would be wonderful to have one place with lots of great posts for homeschooling middle school.

Today I'm going to address the question - "How much help should I give my middle schooler?" We all know that students learn at different paces and in different ways. In fact, that may be one reason we homeschool! It's definitely a benefit of homeschooling. I'm homeschooling my third and fourth middle schoolers right now, so I'm not new to this. Mercie is in 8th grade and Silas is in 6th grade. There is a vast difference in these age gaps - almost 14 and 11. 

I feel like middle school is the big transition from elementary to high school. There are a lot of changes happening in this age group - puberty being the most prominent. I have come to realize that elementary students need a lot of hand holding, and high schoolers don't need much at all. Middle school is where your child learns to let go of your hand, little by little. Some will need more of your hand holding than others will, and that's fine!

Silas is a very smart kid. He was a "late" reader, but now reads way above his "grade level." He is a deep thinker and can ask (and answer!) some tough questions. He's a really fun kid to be around. However, math has been a bit of a struggle for him. It's not that he doesn't know how to work the problems and complete the steps - it's mainly that multiple step problems overwhelm him and then he kind of shuts down.

What I do is sit with him for math - for the entire lesson. He reads the lesson aloud to me and we work through the problems together. If he gets a little overwhelmed or frustrated, I simply walk through the steps with him. I ask him what he thinks we should do next, and if he can't voice it then I tell him. He can then do the step on his own. Then I remind him there's another step to do, and he can usually figure it out. I've found this is especially true with fraction problems - when he has to find common denominators, then borrow to subtract or convert to a mixed number, and then reduce. There are a lot of steps to remember! 

If I left him to do these problems on his own, he would feel defeated before he even started. He would give up before he figured it out. By "holding his hand" in this area, I am teaching him that it's okay to need help. I'm helping him to develop the skills he needs to solve these problems on his own. And by letting go of his hand just a little bit at a time, I am showing him how to be more independent.

He can do many things on his own - long division, multiplication, and we even started decimals this week! When there is a problem I know he can do on his own, I let him. If we encounter a difficult word problem, we talk it out together. When he is dealing with fraction problems, we walk through it step by step.

I am confident that in a few years or less, he will be able to master these problems on his own with no help from me. I am also confident that the help I give him is only helping him to build math skills. 

We have been doing the same thing with his grammar book until recently. We would read the lesson together and walk through each sentence together. I've noticed lately that he doesn't need as much help, and in fact, he has completed the last two lessons almost totally on his own, even checking his work with the answer key. The only thing he needed help with was finding the subject and predicate in inverted sentences.

We do science, history, and other subject together with his 4th grade brother. This is more family-style learning where I read, we discuss, we do projects, and we do notebooking. He is great at making his notebook pages and does most of this on his own. 

In contrast, my 8th grade daughter does almost everything independently. She rarely asks for help, and when she does, it doesn't take much to get her on track. This just reinforces the fact that everyone learns at a different rate. 

Different doesn't mean wrong or bad; it just means different! 

How much help do you give your middle schooler?

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Middle School Monday - Week in Review

It's Tuesday again...so it's time for...

I didn't add Mercie's work in our Homeschool Highlights post Friday, so I decided to make Middle School Mondays consist of her week in review along with other topics. Her birthday is Saturday and she will be turning 13 years old! We went shopping Saturday and she got a ton of clothes. We ate at Cracker Barrel and had a blast together. 

We'll be having cake and ice cream on Saturday, her actual birthday. She asked for a new bicycle, and Rod gladly told her she could pick one out. She found the one she wants, so we just have to go pick it up!

Last week she completed lessons 91-95 in From Adam to Us. Each day she has a lesson to read along with mapping activities, timeline entries, student activity pages, and creative writing assignments. She learned about Columbus, other explorers, Copernicus, Martin Luther, and the Reformation last week. 

 

She also completed four lesson in Apologia's General Science. She finished week 18 out of 30. She had an experiment we never got to because I kept forgetting to get the red cabbage she needed. We plan to get to it this week along with a few more. I told her to start looking ahead and writing down the supplies she needed a week or two in advance. 

She also completed a week in Learning Language Arts Through Literature. She has just about finished the book (we skipped most of the literature units). Next week she will start using Wordly Wise 3000 and a new cursive book. I've also ordered her a grammar workbook that hasn't come in yet. She is reading The Mysterious Benedict Society and loves it! One thing I don't have to do it force her to read. She loves reading.

She also completed a week of lessons in Principles of Mathematics. She is having a little difficulty with word problems and conversions. They're tough so I don't blame her. It takes me a few minutes sometimes! Math is not my favorite subject, but I try to like it because I want my kids to like it.

Mercie has farm chores each day. She has 13 chickens and a few of them just started laying eggs. She feeds them and collects the eggs each day and gets attacked by her rooster. She's been researching how to tame a mean rooster and is trying some new techniques. We didn't even mean to get a rooster; he got put in by accident with the hens when they were tiny. They were identical for several weeks, and then the rooster turned lighter and got bigger! 

She also feeds her goat and a bull. We have lots of cattle but she is responsible for feeding one bull. She also feeds the dogs and waters them. She is very dependable and I don't have to remind her to do anything! She loves animals and wants to be a vet when she grows up. 

She also loves to cook. Last night she cooked tater tot casserole and peas and carrots. She made brownies several times last week. 

What chores do your middle schoolers have?

Middle School Monday - Gordon Korman books

 

Again, this is being posted on Tuesday. Maybe it should be Middle School Tuesday, but it doesn't have the same ring as Middle School Monday.

Anyway, I thought I would share some of Mercie's recent free reading materials. She is in the 7th grade and will be 13 years old on the 6th of February! She loves to read and has been introduced to a new author that we both love to read - Gordon Korman. I'm sure many of you have heard of him or read his books, but we had only read one of his books - Swindle - before. I ordered Mercie a set of six books by him because when I read the descriptions of the books, they sounded like something she would enjoy! I'm going to link to each of the books and give a short summary. I've read them all and she has read most of them, and they are all really great books - boys and girls alike would enjoy them, although the main characters are always boys. 

The Unteachables are a notorious class of misfits, delinquents, and academic train wrecks. Like Aldo, with anger management issues; Parker, who can’t read; Kiana, who doesn’t even belong in the class—or any class; and Elaine (rhymes with pain). The Unteachables have been removed from the student body and isolated in room 117.

Their teacher is Mr. Zachary Kermit, the most burned-out teacher in all of Greenwich. He was once a rising star, but his career was shattered by a cheating scandal that still haunts him. After years of phoning it in, he is finally one year away from early retirement. But the superintendent has his own plans to torpedo that idea—and it involves assigning Mr. Kermit to the Unteachables.

The Unteachables never thought they’d find a teacher who had a worse attitude than they did. And Mr. Kermit never thought he would actually care about teaching again. Over the course of a school year, though, room 117 will experience mayhem, destruction—and maybe even a shot at redemption.

Chase's memory just went out the window.

Chase doesn't remember falling off the roof. He doesn't remember hitting his head. He doesn't, in fact, remember anything. He wakes up in a hospital room and suddenly has to learn his whole life all over again . . . starting with his own name.

He knows he's Chase. But who is Chase? When he gets back to school, he sees that different kids have very different reactions to his return.

Some kids treat him like a hero. Some kids are clearly afraid of him.

One girl in particular is so angry with him that she pours her frozen yogurt on his head the first chance she gets.

Pretty soon, it's not only a question of who Chase is--it's a question of who he was . . . and who he's going to be.

When Donovan Curtis pulls a major prank at his middle school, he thinks he’s finally gone too far. But thanks to a mix-up by one of the administrators, instead of getting in trouble, Donovan is sent to the Academy of Scholastic Distinction, a special program for gifted and talented students.

Although it wasn’t exactly what Donovan had intended, the ASD couldn’t be a more perfectly unexpected hideout for someone like him. But as the students and teachers of ASD grow to realize that Donovan may not be good at math or science (or just about anything), he shows that his gifts may be exactly what the ASD students never knew they needed.

Capricorn Anderson had never watched a television show before. He'd never tasted a pizza. He had never even heard of a wedgie. And he had never, in his wildest dreams, thought of living anywhere but Garland Farm commune with his hippie caretaker, Rain.

Capricorn (Cap for short) lived every day of his life on Garland Farm growing fruits and vegetables. He was homeschooled by Rain, the only person he knew in the world. Life was simple for Cap. But when Rain falls out of a tree while picking plums and is hospital-ridden, he has to attend the local middle school and live with his new guidance counselor and her irritable daughter. While Cap knew a lot about Zen Buddhism, no amount of formal education could ready him for the trials and tribulations of public middle school.

Cap doesn't exactly fit in at Claverage Middle School (dubbed C Average by the kids). He has long, ungroomed hair, wears hemp clothes, and practices Tai Chi out on the lawn. His weirdness basically makes him the biggest nerd in school. This is great news for Zach Powers, big man on campus. He can't wait to instate the age-old tradition in C-Average School: The biggest nerd is nominated for class president -- and wins. So when Cap becomes president, he is more puzzled than ever. But as Cap begins to take on his duties, the joke starts to turn on Zach.

Will Cap turn out to be the greatest President in the history of C-Average School? Or the biggest punchline?

Cooper Vega's family moves so often that he's practically invisible at any school he attends. Now they've relocated to the town of Stratford -- where nobody even makes an effort to learn Cooper's name. To them, he's just . . . whatshisface.

Cooper's parents feel bad about moving him around so much, so they get him a fancy new phone. Almost immediately, it starts to malfunction. First there's a buzzing. Then there's a weird glare on the screen. Then that glare starts to take on the form of . . . a person?

It's not just any person trapped inside Cooper's phone. It's a boy named Roderick, who says he lived in the time of William Shakespeare -- and had a very tangled history with the famous playwright. Cooper thinks his phone has gone haywire, but there's nothing he can do to get rid of Roderick.

Then, even stranger, Roderick starts helping him. Even though his 17th-century advice isn't always the best for a 21st century middle school.

Cameron Boxer is very happy to spend his life avoiding homework, hanging out with his friends, and gaming for hours in his basement. It's not too hard for him to get away with it . . . until he gets so caught up in one game that he almost lets his house burn down around him.

Oops.

It's time for some serious damage control -- so Cameron and his friends invent a fake school club that will make it seem like they're doing good deeds instead of slacking off. The problem? Some kids think the club is real -- and Cameron is stuck being president.

Soon Cameron is part of a mission to save a beaver named Elvis from certain extinction. Along the way, he makes some new friends -- and some powerful new enemies. The guy who never cared about anything is now at the center of everything . . . and it's going to take all his slacker skills to win this round.

Have your kids read any of these books? What have they been reading lately?

Middle School Monday

Mercie is in 7th grade, smack in the middle of middle school! Sometimes she gets overlooked in my Homeschool Highlights, so I decided I would dedicate Mondays to her - Middle School Mondays! (I used to have a Junior High Junction link up for my older two, but I like Middle School Mondays better.) Also, I meant to get this posted yesterday (which was actually Monday) but life happens.

Mercie is using Apologia's General Science course this year and loves it. Today she had a super fun experiment with soap. I'm sure many of you have done this before, but we never have! I happened to have a bar of Ivory soap in my closet left over from our Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes.

She stuck the soap in water and noticed that it floats. That is because Ivory soap has air bubbles inside of it.

She cut the soap open and observed the air bubbles.

Next she put the soap on a paper plate in the microwave for 60 seconds! All the kids gathered around the microwave (in one chair!) to watch what happened.

The soap expanded so much! It was so neat to touch and feel. I didn't read the lesson in the book, so I'm not sure what the object of this experiment was, but all the kids thought it was pretty fantastic.

What did your middle schooler do today?