Middle School Open House

Highlights

Raskob Administrators and teachers met with current 5th grade parents today to highlight the Middle School Program and provide the opportunities for questions and answers. Among the topics:
*Organizational strategies (binders, planners, “First Five”)
*Faculty qualifications: of the 5 middle school teachers, all have Special Education credentials. Three have their Level II credentials. 3 have Masters Degrees. A 4th is currently enrolled in the Masters program at HNU. All regularly attend seminars and conferences, and required monthly professional development at Raskob.
*The change from the 2006-2007 block scheduling (an AM language arts/social studies block and an afternoon math/science block) to 6 periods plus PE and homeroom. This was instigated by faculty in order to allow a dedicated writing period and smaller class sizes in math reading and writing (between 5 and 8 in the core classes)
*Focus of Raskob programs is to make connections to the content. We address curriculum standards, but at a pace that insures engaged learners.
Homeroom period is used for Advisory, in which we teach social skills, advocacy and even more “How to do school” techniques.
*A parent with a current 8th grader and a Raskob graduate at a local public high school spoke eloquently about the benefits of a Raskob education for her alumna: these were the reinforcement of organizational skills and the ability to advocate for herself in a large public school setting.
*Math program was explained as one in which the goal is to teach basic math skills as well as problem solving. We find the Saxon math curriculum to be particularly useful in this regard (incremental, well-sequenced, with distributed review)
*Students are grouped by ability – those who need decoding instruction, but are adequate in reading comprehension, those who decode adequately but need explicit instruction in comprehension