08/27/2016
Are we Ready for Middle School?
As our fifth graders wrap up the year we share a few tips for parents to get a solid start on Middle School. We feel that by the end of fifth grade our students should exhibit some, if not all these abilities below:
Character
Mindful of prayer times and not requiring pressure to pray with family
Be generally truthful and dependable
Develop increasing independence in own tasks
Basic problem-solving skills
Acquire increasingly advanced listening and responding skills, such as responding to peers’ comments and opinions
Enjoy organizing and classifying objects and ideas
Track own appointments and remember times for practice, visits, peer hangouts, etc.
Request needs in a polite and respectful way
Help younger siblings and not appear intimidating or bossy
Enjoy a diversity of activities such as reading, sports, recreational
Have a basic sense of identity and connection to faith
Academic
Be able to read and concentrate for long periods of time
Read complex text fluently and with good comprehension
Research a topic using a variety of sources, and use the features of a book (for example, the index, glossary, and appendix) to find information
Identify conflict, climax, and resolution in a story
Write an organized, multi-paragraph composition in sequential order with a central idea
Correctly use commas and quotation marks in writing
Use problem-solving strategies to solve real-world math problems
Add and subtract fractions and decimals
Understand and do math problems involving parentheses, brackets, and braces
Classify two dimensional figures into different categories (e.g. a rectangle has four right angles, so a square is always a rectangle)
Find the area of two-dimensional shapes
Use long division to divide large numbers by multi-digit numbers
Identify and map a pair of coordinate numbers on the coordinate system (along the x-axis and y-axis)
Social
Have a handful of friends
Enjoy personal time alone as well as time with group of three to five peers
Enjoys talking with parents and sharing information about the day and self
We advise parents to make sure their fifth graders have had an opportunity to visit their new school during the summer or sometime prior to the start of the new school year to get an idea of how it is different than elementary school.
