Student Success

Expectations and Strategies that Promote success

As you may have already noticed or remember from your own experience, seventh grade can be quite challenging. It is a time of dramatic physical, emotional, social, and intellectual change. For many students there is a continual struggle between independence and dependence, focus on school, and focus on non-academic interests and relationships. Managing it all can be difficult.

Seventh grade is a year when often students, parents, and teachers all push for increasing independence for learners. This is a great time for students to experiment with increased responsibility and freedom with their own learning while knowing that there may be some blips along the way. Some students will still need strong levels of support from their home nest of parents and teachers while others may be ready to fly solo for longer stretches of time. As teachers, our goal is to meet each student where they are at and challenge students to take risks, make mistakes, and ultimately learn the organizational systems and learning styles that will work best.

As teachers of young adolescents, our academic expectations are developed to meet diverse scholastic needs while simultaneously supporting social-emotional well-being and preparing each individual for a fulfilling future. Our goal is for each student to be a happy, thoughtful, independent, and well-educated member of the community.

HOMEWORK

Seventh grade students are assigned, on average, 1.5 hours of homework per night - about 20 minutes/class. The goal of homework is to practice and enrich learning that takes place in the classroom. If your child claims that there is no homework or that it was finished in study hall, chances are there are still improvements to be made or skills to review/study.

*If your child is doing homework for several hours on most evenings, chances are it is a time management issue. Identify how much time is really being spent on assignments. Determine whether the time and energy being spent are allocated to the most important part of assignment. Check to make sure that long term assignments are being done a little at a time, as instructed by teachers. Check to see how study hall time is being used.

ORGANIZATION

Having an organization system that works saves time and reduces the number of missed assignments or stressful evenings crunching to finish assignments. Students should use a three-pronged organizational system:

PLANNER/BINDER
GOOGLE CLASSROOM
POWERSCHOOL

Strategies:

Check paper planner, Google Classroom, and Powerschool daily monitor assignments/grades.
Ask your child to show you in-progress or completed work in Google
Classroom. Sometimes students "turn in" incomplete or empty assignments to check it off their list.
Set aside routine, nightly time for homework, regardless. Students should always be reading their independent reading book for ELA class!
Take time each week to organize binder and backpack. Routine binder and locker checks will happen at school as well.

ABSENCES

Class time is an extremely valuable part of the learning process. The conversations, connections, and instructions that are made are lost to the child who is not in school. Being out for only one day can have a significant impact on learning and lead to overwhelming feelings of worry for students.

That being said, we understand that given the times, absences are expected and encouraged when sick. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of the student to find out what was missed and make a plan for catching up.

When absent from school and feeling well enough, students should:

check Google Classroom
talk with classmates about what was done in class
email teacher and make a plan for meeting with teacher (often outside of class time)
Planned Absence Form
See note below from student handbook regarding planned absences. Per school policy, teachers will not be providing work in advance.