What to do to prepare 7th to 9th graders on their journey to a top college
The middle school years are a crucial time for your child's development.
It is during these years that they will start to explore who they are as a person and what interests them. This exploration is essential for your child to develop into the type of person that elite colleges are looking for.
You can support your child in this exploration by giving them the freedom to try new things and express themselves. It is also important to provide emotional support during this time.
Your middle schooler must learn that getting good grades is an achievement that they can be proud of, and that putting in their best effort no matter how challenging a class is what will make you proud of them.
By supporting your child during their middle school years, you will help them lay the foundations for success in high school and beyond.
What to do in 7th grade
By the start of 7th grade, you will have an inkling for the activities that interest your teenager and what his/her academic strengths and weaknesses are. You can build on these early indicators and continue to expose and enrich them to options that will further stimulate their interests and help them discover their passions.
7th grade is when you gradually introduce them to high impact activities that will help them stand out above the crowd, and initiate a deepening of their academic interests and scholarship.
Not every child develops at the same pace, and in 7th grade especially, there can be large variances in maturity levels. What will stand out in 7th grade, and this may have started earlier in 6th grade, is the push to assert independence from you. Many things will require a negotiation, especially around the activities they like or dislike, which is why you have to pay close attention to what engages them and what turns them off.
7th grade sports
Your 7th grader may already fence or ski or sail or play soccer or lacrosse by the time they arrive in 7th grade, but 7th grade opens up many more opportunities to play sports in school. Unless your 7th grader demonstrates exceptional talent for one sport, and even then, you should let them play as many sports as time permits.
Specialization in one sport at 7th grade is premature.
You should let them try both team sports and individual sports, their experience with each will be different, and they will discover something about themselves along the way. For purposes of self-discovery and self-development, team sports is as good as an individual sport.
7th grade academics
The quickened pace, a more demanding curriculum and increased homework assignments could come as a shock for newly arrived middle schoolers accustomed to a more relaxed school environment. Developing good study habits is essential in 7th grade.
See: 9 study habits to make you great
Difficulties with coping with some subjects, like math for example, could surface as your child adapts to a faster pace. These difficulties may be temporary as your child adjusts to the new requirements. Or these difficulties may reflect a longer term challenge with the subject. Either way, you need to be watchful and supportive as your child adapts. Staying in touch with his/her teachers is crucial to making sure that
your child gets the support and understanding needed to cope with the changes.
Whether the difficulties are with math or writing or science, you need to intervene if they are structural for your child. You must help your child reset, and gain confidence in their abilities in whichever subject they struggle in.
The options you have to assist your child include tutoring your child yourself, if feasible, using Khan Academy for math self-help and practice, attending weekend writing or math classes or hiring private tutors.
For the children who adapt quickly to the new pace in middle school, then it is time to introduce subject enrichment to them. This is the start of building scholarship around a subject whether in physics, robotics, poetry, creative writing, bioscience, math, and so on. You can even encourage them to enter age appropriate subject related competitions if available, and they are willing to participate in competitions.
Be mindful that enrichment activities should be in a subject or subjects that your child enjoys and is keen to learn more about. Sending them off willy-nilly to enrichment classes in subjects that don’t get them excited will not get you the result you want, and may totally destroy their interest in academic scholarship.
7th grade extracurricular activities
While your child is ready to be introduced to more impactful activities, they are not ready to independently pursue an activity or a passion.
At this stage, your child should be developing hobbies or participating in activities they have shown strong interests in. You should also be introducing new activities to them that match their interests and personalities. You must support them in these endeavors when they enjoy them. It is the wise parent who follows the child’s indicators of interest rather than mandate activities for them.
Encourage them to explore and participate in school extra-curricular activities as well.
Remember that the highly selective colleges want students who are original. You are more likely to nurture originality if you let your child express and pursue what they like. Parents who mandate an activity, outside of school academics, are more likely to crush that originality.
If your 7th grader loves to paint, write poetry, draw anime cartoons, code apps, photograph the neighborhood trees, build drones from a kit, take apart your old CPU to see what’s inside, build houses in Minecraft, compose lyrics, research the history of Incas…, these are all to be encouraged even if none of their classmates do these things.
Remember also to give them down time where they can hang in their room and chill or hang with their friends outside of an adult supervised activity.
An over-scheduled child has no room to know themselves or let their imagination run free.
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What to do in 8th grade
Your 8th grader is now a full fledged independent-minded teenager with definitive tastes (that will evolve) and opinions of their own. But is not yet ready to be independent. Your emotional support in their endeavors is critical to their development of self and self-confidence.
8th grade sports
The 8th grader should continue to play their range of chosen sports, even if they do have a favorite sport in which they shine. Given that they will be introduced to a whole a new range of sports when they enter high school next year, they should keep their options open. Sports specialization is 8th grade is premature.
8th grade academics
In school, your 8th grader should be focusing on getting good grades and entrenching those good study habits that will help them succeed in high school and college.
See 9 study habits to make you great
You should also be on the lookout for challenges that your child may encounter with their school subjects. Early intervention to help them with their academic struggles is essential if your child is to gain confidence in their academic abilities and not get left behind in any subject.
Extracurricular academic activities to build scholarship you put in place in 7th grade should continue in 8th grade. Remember that you must
take into account your 8th graders feedback on what they want to continue doing, what they want to try that’s new and what they want to drop. If they don’t love it, they will struggle to achieve excellence.
In 8th grade, test prep should enter the horizon. Their first real encounter with the standardized test starts will be with the PSAT, which they will take in 10th grade.
While there is no need to pile on the pressure for the PSAT yet, you can have your 8th grader start systematic preparation on Khan Academy, so that both you and your 8th grader familiarize with what’s expected in the test.
Read National Merit Scholarships prove your academic readiness
The PSAT is typically taken in the Fall of 10th or 11th grade, which means 9th grade is when serious test preparation starts.
8th grade extracurricular activities
As we said earlier, your 8th grader is not ready to pursue activities and passion independently yet, but they can certainly explore their interests and passions with your support.
What they started in 7th grade should continue with adaptation based on your 8th graders feedback. Maybe they discovered a new interest during the summer, and they want to adjust course to include this new interest. Or they may want to drop an activity because they no longer feel that it is a priority for them. Let them explore, change and adapt.
While it is quite normal that we parents want our kids to learn a musical instrument as part of their cultural education, we should not insist on it if they are adamant against learning to play. How many people do you know or know of who learned violin and piano as kids but
never touched the instrument again as adults and have never attended any classical music concerts either?
The time used to learn an instrument they have no interest in crowds out the time your child could have spent doing something else that they really enjoy or are passionate about.
When it comes to extracurricular activities, it is much better to let your child have the last say (of course, within reasonable limits if there are physical or emotional risks) than to insist they engage in an activity because you said so.
What to do in 9th grade
9th grade is when you must start taking many things much more seriously from academic classes, to test prep to extracurricular activities.
9th grade sports
In 9th grade, your child will have access to a slew of high school sports not previously available to them. Let them explore these new sports.
If your child shows athletic promise in a sport, then it’s time to start paying attention to the possibility of athlete recruitment.
See The athlete recruit’s advantage in college admissions
While it is still not necessary to specialize in one sport in 9th grade, you and your child must start entertaining the possibility of specialization and athlete recruitment next year.
Athletes have an advantage in selective college admissions
Sign up to Sports and Athlete Recruitment Member Area and get FREE access to:
The Guide to Athlete Recruitment PLUS
The Free Handbook with sports and team sizes college by college.
9th grade academics
Academic work takes a big step up in 9th grade in terms of intensity and difficulty.
If your child struggles with a subject, there is no time to waste in getting them all the help they need. You can speak to their teacher if the teacher or an older peer can provide support. Alternatively, you can look for tutoring classes or a private tutor to help your child overcome their struggles with a class.
In 9th grade, you must begin serious academic planning for your child including the AP classes they will take over the course of 4 years in high school. It is wise to plan an AP schedule at the beginning of 9th grade and adapt as necessary depending on where your child’s academic interests and aptitudes develop.
Even if you and your 9th grader are unclear what subject concentrations will make sense for an intended college major, you must still schedule the time for the AP courses upfront so you have a clear idea how much room your high schooler has to adapt the academic curriculum.
The most important thing for you to find out is the number of AP classes offered by your child’s high school, whether the AP classes are half year or full year in duration and if there are any restrictions on how many AP classes are allowed at each grade level. Once you have this information, you can plan out the AP schedule.
The rigor of classes taken by a student in high school are an extremely important consideration in the academic evaluation of an application to a highly selective college. These colleges rely heavily on AP classes and their official College Board scores as objective measures of class rigor.
Read How tough classes demonstrate your academic readiness
If your child pursued academic enrichment in middle school, he/she is ready to move to the next level in high school with academic enrichment activities focused on a single academic area. These academic enrichment activities will enhance your child’s academic credentials with the top colleges.
Preparation for the PSAT must now be taken seriously starting sometime in the Spring with continued preparation on Khan Academy and taking practice tests on a regular basis to identify areas of weakness that must be improved. This is especially important if you are aiming for a placement in the National Merit Scholarship. You can seriously consider a PSAT prep course in the Fall of 10th grade just before the test which is usually administered in October each year.
However, if a National Merit Scholarship placement is not a goal, then take the PSAT as an important trial run for the SAT. Unlike the SAT which you sign up to take independent of your high school, you can only take the PSAT if your high school registers to administer it to its’ students.
9th grade extracurricular activities
What your 9th grader loves and what he/she is passionate about is beginning to come into focus.
However, it is still premature to pursue one activity exclusively. Let your 9th grader take their time discovering more about who they are and what excites them.
They can continue what they were doing in 8th grade with adaptations to accommodate new discoveries and preferences.
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