Suggest a Fun or Out of The Box Course for Middle School.

[Gil]

I'm sure that I've seen this type of posts before, but I can't seem to find any of them. Looking for suggestions or inspiration for next year.

[Lori D.]

What are your boys interested in? Middle school is a SUPER time for bunny trail explorations. A few ideas:

Cooking or Baking
Car Maintenance
Electronics (soldering kits!)
Computer Game Design
Computer Coding
Equine Science
Horticulture, Permiculture (Worm Composting), Gardening, Build a Greenhouse
Dog Training
Rocketry
Orienteering
Woodworking
Stained Glass or Fused Glass
Design and Build a Boat
Backyard Ballistics
Microscope Investigations (Kym Wright's Microscope Adventures)
Archery
Journalism
Creative Writing - NaNoWriMo's Young Writers program & resources, for example
Sci-Fi or Dystopian Literature unit study
Study of Weaponry Through the Ages
Make a Scale Model of a Famous Structure/Building

 

Edited November 29, 2020 by Lori D.

[daijobu]

Charles Platt has excellent books on introductory electronics, with the just the right balance of theory and practice.  (Wow, I see his book has nearly 800 reviews now!)

Edited November 30, 2020 by daijobu

[Not_a_Number]

Your kids are advanced, right? So there’s probably a wider range than for most people...

What do they enjoy?

[BakersDozen]

Ellen McHenry's "The Brain". I offer this each summer to middle school students and it's always a huge hit.

Forensic Science

[LucyHoneychurch]

I'm toying with the idea of using On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes as part of a "noticing" course. Reading those segments, maybe supplementing them, taking similar walks and practicing seeing the world in different ways, exercises in perspective. That would be with a younger child, but I think it could work for middle schoolers? They might be at the point where they could design some themselves according to their interests - i.e. what might a manga artist notice? A mathematician?

I was also looking at using a combination of the Great Courses cooking through history + A History of Food in 100 Recipes alongside a world history course, cooking using (somewhat) historically-accurate recipes. Maybe using The Story of Food / The Story of Salt / similar supplements, it would be possible to do a culinary-focused world history course at their level?

If there's interest, the computational linguistic olympiad is more or less logic applied to language. So they'll give you Yoruba, for instance, and a few examples, and you'll have to extrapolate from that how to construct or decipher different statements. Examples here: https://nacloweb.org/practice.php

And I don't know if it's especially fun or out of the box, but I'm a fan of the idea of cyber civics, whether the official course offering or via reading and discussing segments of, say, Sherry Turkle, Nicholas Carr, Digital Minimalism, You are Not a Gadget, etc. Thinking about how they want to live in and respond to the digital world?

It might also be a good time to "learn how to learn." The Great Courses has a psych course called The Learning Brain that it might be fun to pair with The Human Brain Coloring Book. You could also go from the psychology/neurology of learning for one semester to a philosophy of learning the next? Really getting into thinking about what it means, to them, to be educated, maybe an acquaintance with different educational philosophers. I don't know that I'd necessarily throw a french copy of Rousseau at a preteen - but they might read and discuss Sayers, "Why Getting into Harvard is no Long an Honor," "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education," segments of Gladwell and Confucius. I really love the college writing textbook Reading the World: Ideas that Matter (I have the 3rd edition I'm not as sure of the others) - it has topical sections with discussion and writing questions that I think would be accessible to bright middle schoolers. One of the segments is on education.

Cheers!

[theelfqueen]

I'd start by saying "hey, DC, what is something you want to learn?"

And listen to their answers - I always wanted to learn about how theme park rides work, I always wanted to know about plumbing, I've always wanted to build things with saws and hammers, I've always wanted to learn about ice cream, I've always wanted to learn Klingon, I've always wanted to learn to ice skate... and then see what you can do with what they give you. Ice cream? Maybe a cooking class focused on desserts. Klingon? An exploration of con lang and history of language. Saws and hammers? Shop class. Etc... let them give you some guidance. 

[lewelma]

These are projects my younger boy did when he was 2-3 years older than your boys, but at the same level

Half courses (4.5 months):

Organic Chemistry

Development Economics

Demography of NZ

Impact of colonialism in Africa

He has also done 4 week long projects on:

City planning

Leadership

Hydroelectric power

Economic and environmental impact of dairying in NZ

Economics of hotel occupancy

Resource consent process for large projects

Fuel efficiency in cars

Chemistry of soaps and detergents

Chemistry of microplastics

Spectroscopy

Fracking

Hope that gives you some ideas!  Quite a different list than Lori's 🙂 

 

[goldenecho]

If your child likes history or science these unit studies might be good, as they combine it...

The Science of Ancient Egypt  (not free but really cool, and not too expensive)

Experimenting With the Vikings (Free Unit Study)

Marine Biology (another free unit study, at least in printable form...scroll down to the bottom)

 

[BookMamaLade]

I'm especially loving the History of food/cooking class idea. In history classes, I always wanted more info on everyday life aspects. There are several good youtube channels on this stuff now too; that might be a good way to gauge interest.

Tasting History, Townsends, and English Heritage are good channels.

[Btervet]

I've planned some fun middle school classes around my kids (and my own) interests. The main interests are learning to make video games, including game design, programming, and storytelling, historical cooking, and handicrafts.

So far we have started:

Programming - Python for Everyone, and Pygame using Tech w/ Tim on Youtube.

Game Design - Basics using Extra Credits on Youtube

Historical Cooking - There is a Great Courses we are watching and following. We also have a book on Sourdough through history we are cooking from and reading. Lots of extras here pulled from whatever history we are studying as well.

Handicrafts - Currently learning embroidery. Once COVID isolation is over, we will move onto spinning wool with a local group.

 

By the end of middle school the goal is to have DS able to work with the Unity Game engine, and able to use wiki's to pick up the basics on any programming language. One the design front he is working on storytelling, and how to adapt it for gaming specifically, as well as learning about game balance and design in combat. Cooking has no specific goal, just continued progress and keeping the love alive here. For handicrafts the goal, similar to programming, is to reach an understanding of the basics such that he can pick up any craft with a basic lesson. He also wants to see some projects all the way through from "sheep to blanket" as he calls it. 

[Clemsondana]

I am planning a course around food for my middle schooler.  I expect it to have 2 main components - agriculture and cooking.  We grow a lot of our own produce so I'm planning a few labs (testing soil pH), some data collection (maybe time to sprouting for different seeds, testing different conditions, etc), some basic learning (life cycles of the plants), and some more advanced learning (probably looking at good vs bad insects and maybe the various pests that we fight, including an apple-cedar rust with an interesting life cycle).  We may look at why the different food preservation techniques work - we mostly frereze, but we can try canning and dehydrating.  In the colder months I want to look at some Alton Brown-style cooking chemistry and maybe do some experimentation (melted butter vs softened butter vs cold butter vs shortening in cookies).  We might branch off into some nutrition stuff, or looking at how compost is made...there are lots of possibilities.  I got a textbook for my older, who will do a 1/2 credit high school elective that I haven't named yet.  I figure we'll do the ag labs together and use the book but probably not include much of the cooking.