Home-school partnerships provide a strong support system. Besides encouraging parents, teachers, and students to work together for more effective learning and teaching, the system helps parents understand their emerging adolescents. A rural Pennsylvania middle school's "Steps to Success" program offers various activities involved with…

Middle school educators believing in the importance of parent involvement soon discover the need to educate parents as well as students. One Pennsylvania middle school offers a series of workshops focusing on the physical, social-emotional, and intellectual characteristics of students aged 11-13, transmitting information through discussion,…

Traditionally, student-recognition programs have included honor rolls, academic letters, athletic awards for students who excel. Such programs should also reinforce positive behavior and motivate students to try harder. Pennsylvania middle school launched good behavior program involving prizes from local businesses. Staff members handed to be…

The Johnstown (Pennsylvania) Middle School has adopted a simple, practical school bus discipline program that refers disruptive students to the bus-duty teacher to discuss the incident. The bus driver's written report activates the bus-rider training program, featuring temporary loss of riding privileges, a simulated bus ride, a safety video, a…

The Avon Grove School District has a middle school orientation program for incoming elementary students and their parents, which consists of several visits and open houses in the Spring and at the beginning of the Fall term. (SJL)

Connecting students to reading and writing means connecting them to real-world readers and writers. Writers' Day at one Pennsylvania middle school was established to bring regular working professionals (not authors or poets) from the community to school to share how writing is used in their professional and personal lives. All participants…

Involvement in community service can benefit middle-school students by helping them feel valued, teaching responsibility, and improving teacher-student relations. A rural Pennsylvania middle school evaluated community-service opportunities and then employed StarServe, a resource kit encouraging students to develop their own service projects.…

Compares pedagogical practices in an eighth-grade middle school classroom with those a of one-room Amish school studied in an earlier work. Taken together, the two settings suggest that one must seek "the present status and performance of the U.S. education system" not in the usual indicators, but in the contradictory beliefs and…

A crew of seventh and eighth graders at a middle school comprise the writers, editors, and talent of Kid Time News, produced by a Taft broadcasting station in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. News vignettes are aimed at children and include topics such as current events, bike safety, jobs, water safety, babysitting tips, and youth fitness. (MLH)

Describes restructuring objectives and changes at a suburban middle school in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Although collaborative planning led to predictable changes (interdisciplinary teaching, advisories, flexible scheduling, common planning time, core curricula, and a discipline system), several unplanned changes occurred regarding home-school…

In July 1990, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania adopted the Instructional Support Team initiative to identify those students who experience academic, behavioral, social-emotional, and/or communication difficulties, and to provide the needed support to help them succeed. A study evaluated the effectiveness of middle school Instructional Support…

Presents an instructional resource for upper elementary and middle school students that focuses on the life and artwork of Charles Demuth and the impact of community on his artwork. Concentrates on four of his artworks and includes background information on his life and project ideas. (CMK)

At a Pennsylvania middle school, an informal, cooperative effort to apply fractions to cookie recipes resulted in an interdisciplinary project on the homelessness. Embracing home economics, mathematics, art, English, social studies, and reading, the project incorporates the essentials of middle school philosophy: cooperative learning, team…

Providing additional academic challenges to gifted middle schoolers can be demanding, considering their involvement in multitudinous activities. A Pennsylvania school developed a three-prong approach that provides more rigorous curricular content and adopts the group instruction method favored by music departments and the one-on-one technique used…

Designed for grades six through nine, this manual teaches students how the Pennsylvania juvenile justice system works. It explains what a juvenile can expect if accused of violating Pennsylvania law in the hope of convincing students to stay out of trouble with the law. The manual gives a brief history of juvenile justice and a description of the…