Do not count on scholarships- save money. It will be a bonus if money comes from a school.
I forgot about reading as it is so much a part of our lives. Create a reader and it lasts a lifetime.
Can’t resist adding- and once he is in college the clean underwear will be his responsibility/choice.
Encourage him to try new activities. It becomes harder to do this in high school because the time committment goes up. Focus on helping him to explore his interests.
Also make sure he is placed at an appropriately challenging level next year and as he enters high school. If he needs to make decisions now about taking courses for high school credit as an 8th grader, it may help to look through the high school catalog with him, talk about what interests him and what he’d like to get out of high school. Draft out a 4 year plan, keeping in mind that it can be modified as his interests change.
If he works hard at his schoolwork and reads a lot, that’s all he really needs to do as a middle schooler. Don’t pressure him about college admittance.
This breaks my heart. He can’t even be a kid. He isn’t even in high school. He should focus on enjoying every stage of life. He shouldn’t be worrying about this stuff right now. The college application process also evolves over time. I’m sure the application process will be very different in 2020. I mean gosh, he will still be in high school by the time I graduate! Please don’t stress him out with talks about college. Don’t rush his childhood.
Cali- Read the posts- I interpret this as mom looking for planning, not taking away childhood. There are many things one can do to optimize schooling without taking away playtime. Choosing the best classes among options, realizing that starting/continuing a foreign language matters. Many choices. Being college bound starts long before considering which colleges. Enjoying life means different things to different people. My son loved being part of math teams since 5th grade, orchestra and some sports. He needed to keep his mind active. Parents can investigate things so they know what’s ahead. Parents do a lot their kids never hear about.
The kid can be a kid. This thread is mostly about things the parent can do – many of them subtle – to minimize future roadblocks.
The 3R’s are still the keys to high school success. If you stand out at those, everything else will fall into place. The better those skills are in middle school, the easier everything else will be.
Yeah, I don’t see anything heart-breaking here. Almost everyone has pointed to life skills that middle schoolers should be developing and how parents can help. MY heart breaks for the kids whose don’t develop these very basic survival skills while they are still kids because either their parents don’t have the skills either or just don’t care enough to impart them.
It sounds sort of silly, but middle school is a good time to make mistakes that will never appear on your permanent record. My older son got into a shoving fight over something very silly in middle school. One day in-school detention made a lasting impression on him. And as much as I hate to admit it, I think earned him some respect that he was not a doormat.
Another thing a parent may want to do while the child is in middle school is to see whether the school system (or the individual high school) offers any programs for high school students that differ from the standard curriculum and to try to figure out whether their child might be a possible candidate for these programs.
Often, your kid will come home one day in 8th grade with a notice about, say, the deadline for applying to a special program – for example, an IB program. You don’t want to respond with “IB? What’s that?”
LOL - Yes, it’s good to learn from mistakes. DS (a very bright math/science student, now done with college) learned some good lessons in ms. Despite near perfect test scores, he had math/science C’s on the report card due to missing homework. That caught his attention. In hs he was on the ball turning in his assignments.
Agree that he’s in middle school. 7th grade. He’s what, 12? Relax. Other than looking at general curriculum planning and some extracurricular S, let him enjoy life. Do not stress him about college now. Colleges rarely care about much before grade 9 (aside from a long term commitment to some EC). You, though, should be starting a 529 if you haven’t already, and managing your finances and savings so you don’t expect someone else to pay for your kids’ education. Nothing wrong with scholarships, butt having choices is very liberating.
I wished I had read the middle school course book before my kid started middle school. If I had I would have realized that Foreign Language offered in 6th grade counted towards high school GPA/ rank. I didn’t realize that till it was too late.
6th grade foreign language? Where are you that that counts in your HS GPA??? Thats not likely to be a uniform thing
My son was in basketball for 5th grade (where I saw him touch the ball once all season) and middle school. In middle school rec league had something taken from him or some such a couple of times so at one game I talked to the supervising teacher. Apparently my kid was not just on the receiving end, he apparently elbowed the other kid or so. I do not condone this behavior but it was good to hear academic kid was not a wimp but could stand up for himself. So many nonacademic lessons learned in school.
Agree that finding out how your school district does things at the HS as well as middle school level is important for parents sooner rather than later. This is the ideal time for mistakes and finding one’s comfort level in many ways. It is a transition period from the single classroom to HS classes. Grades- my son chose to not always do homework his senior year (and before?)- too bad his freshman grades didn’t count as much as his junior year, sigh.
I would suggest finding a place you can volunteer together (most places won’t take him as a volunteer without you there). Doing this enabled my child to gain empathy, learn how much fun working toward a goal can be and helped find out what things were a good fit and what things were not.
I agree with @CaliCash. While I think it’s good to develop good study habits, do homework, etc. it’s too early for the child to devise a strategy or path to “a good college”. Let the child explore and develop into a good person, first. So many appear to be good students in middle school and then crash in high school.
As a parent of a 7th grader my immediate goal is to make sure he’s getting ready for high school. I want to make sure he has opportunities to see where his interests generally lie.
But my main task regarding college right now is to fund his college funds (ack!) and track college costs even if I don’t like the opposite directions of the costs (up) and fund (down) are taking.
@jym626, In our school district. They offer Spanish 1A starting in 6th grade. It is the first 1/2 of Spanish one spread over the entire year. And yes, it does count towards high school GPA and class rank.
it seems horrible that some schools are counting your 6th grade scores toward the high school GPA. talk about a permanent record! I don’t think our HS counts anything from middle school, but this reminds me maybe i should check. or maybe my student should…
It is a choice not a requirement. Kids can wait till high school to take foreign language.
In our middle school nearly everyone takes a foreign language in 7th and 8th grade, but because they stretch what is basically a year’s worth of material they don’t put it on the transcript, just give credit for it. OTOH for the high school level math and science courses which they offer to 8th graders, they make it extremely clear when you sign up that the grade will be on the transcript. They discourage kids from signing up if they don’t think they’ll get at least a B.
All the studies show that the earlier you start studying a foreign language the better. It’s too bad to scare middle schoolers away because parents of 6th graders are afraid their kids aren’t mature enough to take the course seriously. (I think most 8th graders understand the stakes, and those who are extra accelerated in math, generally excel in the classes anyway.)