1st Edition
Chaos to Context A Parent’s Guide Through the Middle Grades
This book is your roadmap to successfully navigating your child’s middle school years!
Marked by significant physical, cognitive, and emotional changes, this period poses unique challenges that can have a profound impact on middle-grade students' academic performance, social and emotional well-being, and overall development. This book provides the knowledge, resources, and strategies needed to successfully navigate these challenges while creating a nurturing and supportive environment. In addition to covering topics such as puberty, changing social dynamics, identity exploration, digital literacy, and self-advocacy, chapters also provide resources for further reading and reflection questions to inspire dynamic discussion between parent and child.
Parents, caregivers, and educators of middle school students will find the support and guidance in this book invaluable as they help their student foster growth, resilience, and success while navigating this key period of change.
1. Spoiler Alert: It’s Puberty. Puberty’s the Problem 2. Unveiling the Adolescent Brain 3. It's Time for Identity Exploration 4. The Changing Social Dynamics of Middle School 5. The Role Of Grown-Ups in the Middle Grades 6. Academics and Middle School: A New Frontier 7. Our Collective Challenge: Technology, Social Media, and the Middle Grades 8. Good People Who Do Good Things
Biography
Jody Passanisi has been working with middle graders for 15 years. She is the director of the upper school at Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School in Palo Alto, California, and teaches social studies methods to teachers at Mt. St. Mary’s University and Hebrew Union College’s DeLeT program. She has written about education for Scientific American and Education Week and is the author of History Class Revisited (2016, Routledge). She advises parents about how to support their kids through middle school @chaostocontext on Instagram.
