More and more research has been conducted on the importance of student's sense of community and achievement. Students with a higher sense of belonging to a class have been associated with higher expediencies of success and higher perceptions of class content to be interesting,useful, and important. One area that students often struggle is the transition between Elementary and Middle School. These transitions can create great anxiety in students. The sense of belonging and community has to start again. Students are often left wondering, "Will I fit in at Middle School? Will I have classes with my friends?" I have struggled with this transitions for my Gifted Students. I have asked myself," How can I ease my students transition to Middle School?" Thanks to technology I have came up with a beginning step to help my students transition.
I have teamed up with the Middle School Gifted Educator that my students will have in middle school. We are connecting my 5th graders with her 6th and 7th graders via social networking to allow them to build relationships that will allow my students to have a contact person to go to when they have questions. I have created a simple Google Doc template to start our conversations. Once we have a sense of how to communicate then the goal is to move to a social networking site to further the connections.
I have attached my simple template.
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