Grade 7 FAQs
How does The Advent School help prepare students for Seventh Grade?
Is there an advantage to keeping a student at Advent through Sixth Grade?
How does Advent assist students in choosing and gaining admission to the right school for Seventh Grade ?
How can I best help my child during this transition?
How does Advent help students learn test skills to prepare for placement tests?
How do Advent Students tend to fare in their next school?
How does The Advent School help prepare students for Seventh Grade?
The Advent School prepares students to enter Seventh Grade by preparing them to learn in any environment.
The Advent School provides a setting in which young children learn to believe in themselves as students, as learners and thinkers, to make connections among disparate fields of inquiry, and to play a formidable role in academic learning groups. Within every school experience they practice specific processes such as categorizing information, making hypotheses, drawing inferences, and verifying their thinking with specific evidence. These are skills they work to develop in all curricular areas, from science to literature. Teachers help their students to become cognitively aware of the thinking they do so that when they go to another class or school they can transfer these skills effectively.
Sixth Graders know more than content or facts. They can analyze information and ideas, know themselves as students, and recognize what excellence involves. Graduates from The Advent School are prepared to embark upon any learning experience independently, yet realize that there are unlimited benefits to formulating and interacting with ideas in a small group.
The values we hold dear at The Advent School instill positive, other-oriented behaviors, and good social choices. When our students move on, they can communicate clearly and openly, and they adapt quickly and easily to new social situations.
Is there an advantage to keeping a student at Advent through Sixth Grade?
The elementary years play a highly significant role in the formation of a child’s thinking, approach to learning, and development of sense of self. Committing to one school for the entire seven to eight-year span of time provides students with far more than the basic skills. Students are grounded in educational values and organizational strategies.
Typically, middle schools believe—as does Advent— that the benefits of staying in one’s own school far outweigh anything that might be gained by making a switch. For that reason, schools rarely accept our children from Fourth or Fifth Grades. They recognize that the developmental leaps children make from age 10-12 present enormous opportunity. Children can solidify their skills and thinking strategies, learn to apply organizational tools, and bring positive closure to their elementary school years. They depart as outgoing, confident, prepared students, who know a great deal about themselves and the part they play in a community.
Staying at Advent for the duration enables a child to build confidence and move into abstract areas of thinking as a natural process. As members of a small classroom group they have the time and safety to make mistakes, become leaders, and model all they have learned as the oldest children in the school. The results are impressive. Uninterrupted time to develop is a phenomenal gift to children, and the essential grounding they need to be life-long learners.
Finding schools that are a good match for our Sixth Graders is among the most important things we do at The Advent School. The Head of School stays in regular touch with secondary schools in the greater Boston area and makes site visits to one or two institutions each Fall to stay current on the profiles of local schools.
Our goal is to help each family find the schools that are appropriate and a good match. At Advent, we believe that there is no one right school for a student. We are fortunate to have many options in our area.
How can I best help my child during this transition?
A parent’s positive demeanor has a significant bearing on a child’s experience. Parents can support their child by being relaxed about the prospects for their child’s transition to a new school and remaining focused on the importance of the Sixth Grade year.
How does Advent helps student learn test skills to prepare for placement tests?
In order to help our students feel comfortable with the ISEE testing experience used to place Seventh Graders, Advent works closely with a KAPLAN Test Prep professional to help students develop strong test skills.
A KAPLAN teacher meets with students on Friday afternoons in the spring of Fifth Grade and Fall of Sixth Grade for a total of eight sessions. Because the last session is close to the actual testing date, Advent student have tended to feel confident and relaxed about their test-taking experience.
Advent is one of few, if not the only, elementary school in Boston that provides this opportunity for students. Parents pay approximately half of what KAPLAN charges for courses at their facilities.
How do Advent Students tend to fare in their next school?
Because of the strategies learned at every grade at Advent, our students adapt and perform very well in their next school settings. As one parent stated, “Advent students feel so good about themselves that they respond to the demands of and bring confidence to any school, regardless of its size or composition.”
Advent graduates are stars and leaders. Our students understand academic material in such a way that they can apply it in new contexts. They perform in the classroom, in every academic subject area, in the arts, and on the field. They are team players, sensitive to their peers, and know how to work successfully in any group. They are class officers and active participants in their communities.
