middle school advice?

Little Lulu,

I don’t have a MSer yet, but I am already working on my outline. Color coding everything is what we are doing. Red tab are English, with red book cover - even red tabs on her dana for File 1. Also, tape his schedule inside his locker and color code the different classes. Type Before Lunch: English Rm 404; Science: Rm. 402 And highlight or place a color coded label beside that subject. Then Lunch, then next subjects under After Lunch with appropriate color coding. That’s our plan.

Additionally, getting him his combination lock in advance and letting him practice b4 the 1st day of school would probably be helpful, as well as taking him around the school to get his bearings.

Classroom notes provided by the teacher are one of the things we are requesting, as well as a 2nd set of books at home.

My daughter is alot like your son. Although she has hypersensitivity to light and sound and gets overwhlemed with too much too fast, she has good social skills.

Those are things that are on my list for next year (currently going into 5th). I’m making my needs outline now.

Does your son have an IEP? If not, can you get him classified? Having the school resource teacher available to help with regular ed teachers was what got my son (written expression LD) through 6th grade. The teachers need to know what kind of kid they’re dealing with, to diffuse any potential problems.

Organization is important. Go through his backpack every day, and make sure you know what is due and when. If they’ve got a school organizer, make him use it. Help him organize his papers daily (a slip of a day and everything can be a mess.) Having e-mail contact with teachers can help too. Weekly or monthly reports can let you know when problems are cropping up.

The homework can be overwhelming. Set aside a quiet space at home and a regular time to do it. Give him lots of breaks. Help him edit written work. Transcribe for him if there’s too much to do. Read texts out loud if it’s too much on a given day. Provide lots of positive feedback. And make sure he has an occasional break day…even if it means pulling him out of school for the day.

Good luck,

Kay

Has your dd hit high school yet?

I found high school much easier than middle school. Middle school teachers IMO go overboard on ‘preparing them for high school’. They give out homework like mad and are picky about the dangest things. My sons had papers tossed(and were given zeros) for abbreviating the month or using blue ink instead of black.

Then they got to high school and the teachers were so glad to have kids showing up and staying awake, all that silly detail stuff was pointless

I hate middle school, can you tell????

One thing I would try to avoid is having all the tests on Fridays. This was hard on my 2 who are strong students-Im not sure what you can do about it if the teachers wont cooperate. I honestly think it should be school policy to spread them out but….thats me!

Definitely look into an IEP if he doesnt have one. I would consider using the diagnosis even if you dont agree if that is what it will take.

Labels open doors.

There is a variation of aspergers.autism called semantic pragmatic disorder. Its been awhile since Ive read your posts but I seem to recall our kids are similar. I often feel this fits my guy the best. In a nutshell, kids with Aspergers have strong language skills and weak social skills. The semantic pragmatic disorder presents with stronger social skills and weaker language skills. You might want to google it

I am homeschooling my son in lieu of middle school. Well, thats the plan-I hope i can stick it out at least a year :wink:

My son finished 6th grade in June and what was clear is that middle school allows the child’s talents and deficits to stand out , without all those “mothering” and sometimes interfering elementary school teachers. For better or worse middle school with it’s 7-9 periods, lockers, social demands, dreaded longterm assignments and homework and tests actually graded with numbers and letters, allows parents to stand back and let their child have some success and failure on their own. Yes, I helped and superivised homework and assignments, read textbooks, helped develop study guides, but my son loved 6th grade(in reg. ed., no special services), and learned to organize things, and get allong with a whole new group of kids. I found the teachers FAR more flexible and supportive than I expected and also saw that many nonLD kids can’t speel or write creatively. My son did not want the label of sped, the resource room is mainly for kids with behavior problems in his school. You know your child best, though, and need to advocate for what he needs.

To Sar,
You were very lucky to have flexible teachers and no problems in middle school. For us, 6th and 7th grade were sheer hell, primarily because of inflexible teachers who wouldn’t follow 3 simple points on my son’s IEP. (Mind you, this wasn’t all the teachers, but some of the core subject ones.) It wasn’t until 8th grade that my son had a successful academic year without struggles and tears.
What having the IEP (and resource teacher) gave us was the ability to go in and request our son be removed from toxic teacher’s classes where there was an alternative. (Unfortunately, for 7th grade Language Arts, there was no alternative.) Resource rooms vary from school to school, at my son’s, they grouped kids with similar LDs, so it wasn’t full of kids with behavioral problems. It also wasn’t a social stigma, as kids are changing classes, and noone really knows what other classes their friends are taking.

To Lulu,
Another thing you can do to help your son is get a tutor to deal with his academic problems. That was a lifesaver for us. She was a former middle school teacher who knew what was expected, and helped him achieve those expectations. She worked with him on long term assignments, taught him how to read books for LA and pull out the information the teachers’ wanted.

To Maryacas,
I certainly hope we find high school easier. However, my son is going to a heavily academic school (in a town with the main state university, so full of high achieving professor’s kids), so we’re not expecting anything easier. In fact, reports from other parents indicate the work load will be stepped up even more. Adding this on to the additional extracurricular activities, and we’re gearing up for another year of struggles. And it starts in just 2 weeks! AAARRRGGGGHHHHH!

Kay

Your description of your son’s skills - and his reaction to frustration - is concerning in terms of finding his way to success in Middle School. But that his social skills are strong is a great plus for happiness in Middle school where social interaction becomes so very important.

Everybody is talking about homework overload these days and as a parent and a teacher, i find homework to be doing more harm than good. It’s out of control and for students with learning differences, the heavy workload feels even heavier.

Each school responds differently to parent input but you’re an experienced parent at your Middle School and likely know the personality of your school. Some schools want to know if students are being overloaded with homework and want to make adjustments around that. But if teachers don’t respond well to parent input on homework overload, the only other response I know is to pull up one’s sleeves and help with the homework. As a parent of my own LD son, I looked past all my colleague’s admonitions about parents not helping with homework and every night I helped. It exhausted me but it enabled my son to not feel overwhelmned and unsuccessful in school.

It also prevented his teachers from pulling out the too often used classic excuse of teachers - “he’s just lazy’ or “he doesn’t care’. That label serves no student well. Teachers sadly can shut down too and I find they can shut down quickly.

With organization and processing issues, just knowing what the homework is can be a problem. Encourage your school to develop a website where nightly homework is posted. More and more schools are doing that. consider asking teachers (if they will) to e-mail assignments or to write up a weekly homework chart. Those teachers who scribble homework assignments on the board or who announce it verbally are doing it the old-fashioned way.

If your son allows it, you can help him stay organized every night at home. Go through the papers and put them in a binder. Clean out the bookbag clutter. Make a large calendar in the house and write down due dates for long term assignments. And if you will, never hesistate to help with homework. I typed many papers for my son while he dictated them to me. It was a great time saver.

If teachers truly wanted children to be independent with their homework and wanted our children to learn independence from homework, they’d assign less of it. The amount of homework assigned is counterproductive to the goal of having children be independent.

Check out a book called The End of Homework if you can. It makes interesting reading.

Good luck.