Middle schoolers have been up to exciting things in Study Skills! Sixth graders have been exploring ways to plan and organize their time, critical skills that will set them up for success throughout middle school. As part of this, students created personalized study plans for their first math test. They have also been working on planning…by doing it backwards! First, students visualized and planned out or sketched the end product, asking themselves, What will this look like when I’m done? Next, they thought through the steps needed to complete the task, answering the question What do I need to do, and how much time do I need to do it? Finally, they made a list of materials they needed. By making the plan backwards and working the plan forwards, students practiced working towards an end goal. Since it was around Halloween when we began learning this technique, we practiced with an edible project: making a spider out of cookies and pretzels. We’ll apply the “Get Ready, Do, Done” method to less delicious, more academic tasks next!

Meanwhile, seventh and eighth graders are delving into methods for organizing and remembering information. These older students are building on the foundations of time management they learned in Study Skills last year to dive deeper into techniques for processing and retaining knowledge more effectively. Two strategies we’ve emphasized are purposeful highlighting and note-taking. With purposeful highlighting, students learn to identify the most important ideas in a text, and to set a purpose before reading in order to best retain key information. For note-taking, the emphasis has been on first, simply determining what to write down out of all the many things said during a class period, as well as listening for signpost words to figure out how a lesson or lecture is organized. Students have evaluated and compared sample class notes, practiced taking and critiquing their own notes, and next will practice with a few simple ways to organize information. The intention of this focus on note-taking is to provide options that students can use across classes to support their learning.

Throughout these lessons, students are discovering that studying isn’t a one-size-fits-all process—it’s about finding what works best for them.

Sixth graders use the “Get Ready, Do, Done” planning process to create a Halloween treat.