How to prepare your Middle School Child for High School by Tapping Into Their Intellectual Growth

When I think of middle school children, I remember carpooling my son and a friend to a homeschooling event. Most of the way there they entertained each other seeing if either one of them could lick their own elbows. Despite the day-to-day shenanigans of this age group, middle school is the time to be preparing your middle school child for the person he is becoming.

This article is the second in a series, Preparing Your Middle School Child for High School. In our first article you read about teaching your middle school child to work independently. 

You learned how important it is to teach your middle school children that they are responsible for their homeschool work. That they are there to work for mastery, not just finish their assignments. And that the purpose of mastery learning is to prepare them for the next step in their educational journey—high school.

In this post, I’m addressing the developmental changes in your middle school children, and how your relationship also begins to change, as well as some of your teaching methods.

Moving from an instructor to a coach/mentor.

As a parent, your job is to coach and mentor your kids to ultimately help them develop into the people God has created them to be.  In other words, you want to move out of the role of telling them what to do and into the role of coming beside them as they begin taking responsibility for themselves.

You’re moving into the role of being their mentor and coach.

Also, I’m talking teaching methods and types of curriculum to maximize learning during this period. Your goal is to help them with critical thinking and preparing your middle school child to excel in high school.

Preparing your middle school child for high school involves moving from teaching isolated facts to helping them see connections.

Fortunately, as your student begins to move into the middle school years (or logic stage, if you have a classical bent) he or she is capable of more than just learning facts in isolation. As middle school children reach this stage, they are better able to:

In other words, she is beginning to think more analytically.  Our goal as teachers is to recognize this developmental stage when it arrives and encourage this higher level thinking by the way we teach and the curriculum materials we use.

Often this new analytical/critical thinking stage announces itself with a surge of questioning, combined with what often sounds like a hint of criticism. 

Students who learned years ago to obey are now asking, “Why do we have to do things this way?” 

This can be a bit unsettling to parents who have anticipated those ‘teen years’ with dread. You’ll be glad to hear that this is normal and natural.

They are questioning, in part, at least, because their reasoning ability is increasing, and this is just what we want to encourage.

Questioning is healthy, but disrespect is not.

Don’t fall for the false worldview that disrespectful behavior during this period is “normal, and just a stage” that your kids will outgrow. How you respond to your student during middle school will influence the type of relationship you will have in the high school years.

Actually, homeschooling high school might be some of your favorite homeschooling years!

The content of what they are learning is important, of course, but so is the way you teach it.

One of the most effective ways to promote higher level, critical thinking is through dialogue.  Help prepare your middle school child for high school by teaching them to think about the information they are learning and connect it to something else they have already learned.

Ask questions to remind them of what they already know about a topic and encourage them to list things they don’t know but would like to learn about it.

To build these critical thinking skills, start a new topic/theme/unit with using the simple method in the link above.

As you work through the topic or unit, encourage your middle school children to generate their own questions and research the answers. But, you ask, what do I say?  How do I encourage this kind of dialogue?

First, when learning about anything, teach your students to answer the ‘basic’ questions:  who, what, when, where, why and how. 

Once that foundation of knowledge is laid, move to the higher level questions. Here are some ideas to get you started.

Preparing your middle school child for high school means higher level discussion and writing:

Here are some questions and statements to use as discussion or writing prompts,

When studying a historic event:

When studying a person,

After reading a book, discuss or use these questions as writing prompts:

***Begin teaching discernment in earnest, in Middle School.  It’s time for your student to learn that authors write from their own worldview, which may or may not be the one to which you and your student subscribe. Regularly discuss authors’ worldviews as they apply to movies, books, television shows, advertisements, social media, etc. Science books often have a few obvious sentences that pertain to evolutionary thought—help your students learn to pick up on that and teach them to be like the Bereans, who “examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” (Acts 17:11) Introduce this practice during middle school and continue it throughout high school.  (At that time, we recommend more formal worldview studies.)

Click here for many more writing prompts.

What if my middle school student is not interested in these types of discussions?

1.  Your younger middle school student may not be developmentally ready for them.

2.  Try easing your student into them by beginning with a question or two here and there rather than expecting lengthy discussions.

3.  Realize that some students are naturally more verbal than others, but speaking and putting one’s thoughts in writing is good practice for everyone. So have all your students do it, taking into consideration their natural gifting and current abilities.

4.  Remember that during the middle school years, besides some increasing mental ability, your students are experiencing a myriad of physical and emotional changes that take a toll on ability to focus on school.  Be patient. 

Many parents have found (myself included) that increased physical activity can be most helpful to resistant sons, particularly, at this age.  I regularly sent mine outside to run around the house a few times during these years. 😉

5. Parents who use narration as an evaluation technique in the elementary years usually find that their students are more verbally responsive in later grades. Read here how to teach narration to your kids.

Vary Teaching Methods and Materials during middle school

Public and private instruction and curriculum often cater to kids who can read well and think “linearly.”

But not only are there PLENTY of us who learn differently, educational research shows that the more learning modalities that you use, the better we all learn. 

An ancient Chinese proverb sums up this concept:

“I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I do and I understand. “

As home educators, we are in an ideal position:  we can identify our students’ learning styles, we can choose curriculum and teaching methods that match, and we can offer curriculum that utilizes a number of learning modalities to maximize learning.

Take advantage of this blessing!

Our teaching style and materials should promote active learning.  By middle school, it is time to move away from fill in the blank answers, worksheets and ‘textbook sound bites.’  It is time to more deeply explore a subject. 

For example, rather than a summary chapter about World War I, have your middle school student read an historical novel about it. This will immerse your student in the culture of the time period as s/he relates to a character who “lived” through those events.

In your discussions, help your middle school child identify what lead up to WWI and how the world changed as a result.  After studying World War II, compare and contrast the two wars, using other higher level thinking skills. 

(Note that your student is just developing these reasoning abilities, so you are guiding discussions at the middle school age, rather than asking for well written essays!)

Look for middle school curriculum that includes hands on assignments and varied learning experiences.

Curriculum that includes activities in addition to reading and writing will meet the needs of kinesthetic and auditory learners, as well as provide all students with opportunities to analyze and synthesize, two advanced learning skills. 

Student activities that emphasize these skills include:

Curriculum that provides for these varied learning experiences will reach and engage students more than traditional textbook curriculum! You’re kids will retain much more by active learning than by memorizing facts.

Recognizing the dramatic physiological and mental changes of your middle school student requires you to modify your teaching strategies and curriculum choices to keep up with their increasing intellectual abilities.

Are you teaching, or going to be teaching a middle school student?  What could you use from this post that would help you in preparing your middle school child for high school?

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Read my third post in this series called  12 Surefire Ways to Prepare Your Middle School Student for High School.