Upper Elementary Vs. Middle School
The Misfit Middles of Education.
As I start my journey into the virtual space of sharing my teaching practice, a question keeps popping up for me: how do I let people know what grades my thoughts apply to? I teach fifth grade English and Language Arts. I see a few different groups of kids a day, but I also have a homeroom group that spends a good portion of their day with me. Something about this set up has always left me feeling a little out of place in the search for online resources.
I think this is true for many teachers in grades 4, 5, and 6. At many schools, these are transition years. When I student taught 8th grade, for example, it was very clear cut: I saw six different groups of kids a day for forty-five minutes at a time. Then, I spent my first year teaching 6th graders in an elementary building. The expectations suddenly became a bit more murky.
Yes, I had groups rotate through, but only three. I also had to learn how to navigate getting my homeroom to related arts and special events – a major shift from when I simply waited for the bell to ring and dismissed my students, confident they would find their way.
Too Cool for School
This awkward balance is clear in the curriculum as well. Certainly the fifth graders I work with are a bit beyond coloring in cutesy clip art as an activity, yet still at an age where integrating some use of color is fun and engaging. Likewise, they seem a bit beyond ‘carpet time’ yet still able to benefit from creating a familial classroom culture. They are at an age where many of them have phones, but aren’t yet in lockstep with the Tik Tok hivemind.
It’s always seemed clear to me that grades 4, 5, and 6 are at that stage where in many ways they are too cool for the typical elementary experience…but not quite ready for the voyage of independence that often marks grades 7 and beyond.
When I began looking for resources that seemed developmentally appropriate, I found myself often stranded between the overly cutesy nature of early elementary and the dry rigor of high school. Terminology didn’t seem especially helpful either, with ‘upper elementary’ often referring to 3-5 and ‘middle school’ referring to 5-8. How could it be possible for the best practices for my group to be equally applicable to third graders as it was to eighth graders?
Age Appropriate Intervention
This past year, I went on a search for appropriate intervention resources for my struggling readers. I was handed the equivalent of ‘See Spot Run’ and told to use that as guided reading with emergent readers. I gave it the old college try, and certainly those students participated amicably, but the buy in was just not there (who can blame them when I hand them a picture book about a squirrel hiding nuts?). Nor were the resources actually challenging enough. So I was stuck with students below target level, but without developmentally appropriate resources to bridge the gap. This lead to my current goal: develop my own intervention resource binder that can be a good fit for those students…but that’s a post for another day.
My point is that I’ve found that 4th, 5th, and 6th grade seems to feel the most similar, yet are often split across two groups. Oddly enough, my state divides licensure by K-4 and 4-9! This is just one more piece of evidence to me that grades 4, 5, and 6 are really meant to be their own bundle of awkward middle years. Fifth grade, especially, has seemed like a ship tossed between the waves, offering a blend of resources with the smiling children clipart before expecting them to write a proper five paragraph essay and begin to navigate citations. It feels like an odd balance, and my goal has become to redefine these grades.
Follow along here on my blog as I try to find the perfect balance of rigor and engagement in those awkward transition years – and click here to check out my Teachers Pay Teachers store where I create resources aimed at striking the perfect balance for 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th grade learners!