Advice for Parents of Middle-Schoolers

High school teacher Lance Balla suggests the following:

• Understand what kind of learner your child is. Does he need silence to concentrate? Then make sure the TV is not on when he is studying. Provide an appropriate learning environment at home.

• Stay engaged with your child and her teachers. Be proactive. Don’t wait until the first report card. Make sure you know what is expected of your child and that he is meeting the teacher’s expectations. If you wait for the report card, it may be too late. If your school has an online grading system that you can access, make sure you log on frequently to see how your child is doing.

• Create a college-going culture at home. Emphasize that you expect your child will go to college.

• Model good reading habits. If your child sees you reading, then he will be more likely to become a reader, too.

Suzanne Owen, English teacher, literacy coach and mother of four in Antioch, California, suggests these tips:

• Subscribe to a newspaper and encourage your children to read it. Newspapers provide more detail and background than the Web or sound bites on TV. Newspapers also help make connections between what appear to be disparate bits of information.

• Talk to your kids about what they are learning; not about grades, but actual content.