Tips for Helping Your Child

When students reach 7th grade, they may add another subject, and the content is continuing to be more specific and more abstract. It can be hard for families to keep track of the expectations and remember the content from their middle school experiences. Here are some tips for supporting your child in life science class this year. Please see the Rachel Carson Website for more general tips on organization and expectations and support resources for your seventh grader.

The Expectations page is a great place to start understanding how homework, grades, assessment, and preparedness work in the classroom.

Students in Life Science have the opportunity for a paperless classroom through Google Classroom. It is often a great change for students organizationally because papers cannot be lost and work that has not been turn in can still be viewed. Sometimes students prefer paper for certain assignments and most of the time the Google Doc can be printed and turned in on paper.

Because the work can no longer just be spread out on the kitchen table, a great way to engage in the learning with your child is asking your child to open up their Google Classroom and viewing work that they have completed. Have a conversation about what they learned on an assignment and what assignments may be upcoming. As which assignments they feel the most proud of and will include in their portfolios. Although they may or may not be willing at first, setting up the routine of doing this nightly or weekly, depending on your child's needs, can help prevent your child from getting behind or causing miscommunication as they become more independent learners in middle school.

Student progress on the standards will be accessible through the google spreadsheet shared with you and your child. It will also show feedback on homework, classroom engagement, and organization as defined by the rubric on the expectations page. Only the standards will be reported out during progress reports and report cards.

Our cluster posts lots of information to communicate homework and what's going on in the classroom. The cluster page calendar can be used for homework assignment reference.

Instead of a textbook, many hours are spent curating the latest, most accurate, most appealing, and most accessible resources for your child. If your family would like to have a textbook at home as a reference, you may request one.

I also recommend the "Big Fat Notebook" as a quality, appealing reference. I am working on acquiring classroom copies and some to borrow.

Life Science is full so many wonderful words from heterozygous to photosynthesis to binomial nomenclature to endoplasmic reticulum! We spend a lot of time with word study, breaking apart words, finding common root patterns, and using and saying the words aloud. This focus on ownership of the vocabulary is key for students to sound like the scientists they are becoming and to fully display the understanding they are acquiring. A great way to help your child is to ask them, "What is the weirdest word you learned this week?"