One of my biggest bugaboos as a parent has been the difficulty in catching up with missed work and instruction when my daughter has been sick and absent from school. In younger grades, she was usually excused from the assignments she had missed, but there was also no real support for her to learn the content she had missed. Now, in middle school, she is expected to make up all the work, and to find out what the work was by asking classmates. In some classes this is easier than others: she has friends to ask, and the work is from the textbook. But at other times it is harder because she has no good friends in the class, or the work was a worksheet of which she can not easily get a copy.
Students who arrive midyear go through all this times ten.
I wish classrooms had a student job to collect homework assignments and materials for the kids who are absent. Since there will almost always be at least one student absent, it makes sense to build support for those students into each day's lesson plans.
Similarly, since most classes get 1 or 2 new students in the course of the year, why not plan for them from day 1? The class could create extra reading, math, and science folders and so forth to give like a gift to new students when they arrive.
Students who arrive midyear go through all this times ten.
I wish classrooms had a student job to collect homework assignments and materials for the kids who are absent. Since there will almost always be at least one student absent, it makes sense to build support for those students into each day's lesson plans.
Similarly, since most classes get 1 or 2 new students in the course of the year, why not plan for them from day 1? The class could create extra reading, math, and science folders and so forth to give like a gift to new students when they arrive.
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