MS Teams

Dear Grade 6 Parents:

It was a pleasure seeing many of you at our Grade 6 Parent Welcome.  It is our hope that this was a beneficial and informative meeting. Here is the presentation shared this morning.  In addition, we would like to point you in the direction of several resources:

1) The Hopkinton Middle School website contains a wealth of information that is being updated on a regular basis.  As you may know, we migrated to a new website over the summer. Many of the items from the former website are categorized differently; I encourage you to utilize the “Find it Fast” button in the top right corner of the website.

2) The Counseling department’s website is an outstanding resource.  Be sure to check out both their main page as well as the Resources and Books tabs .  

3) Finally, we invite you to follow and interact with us on Social Media:

• Twitter 

• Instagram

• Facebook 

We are excited for the coming year and very much look forward to working closely with you and your child.

We are delighted to welcome you to Hopkinton Middle School.  Our community works hard everyday to challenge our students, motivate them to excellence, inspire their curiosity, and have fun while doing each.  

Students will be assigned to an academic team and will rotate through rich Related Arts offerings. In addition to the regular school day, we are extremely proud of our diverse extracurricular offerings--with over fifteen new additions in the past five years.  Our school offers a myriad of ways to get involved, to connect with others, to develop and practice leadership skills, and to have fun.

Our staff is passionate about our students’ knowledge, understanding, and application and is committed to ensuring student learning at high levels.  We have a tremendous support system in place to assure that each student will find success here at HMS.

Your children will learn from a devoted staff who have great expertise in adolescent development as well as their subject matter who are eager to begin working with you and your child.

Again, welcome to Hopkinton Middle School.  We look forward to meeting each new sixth-grader and delight in being a part of their lives.

Sincerely,

Alan Keller, Principal

Dear Incoming Grade 7 Students and Parents:

 Our students and staff work very hard to ensure a successful transition to our Middle School in grade 6.  There are several ways in which we ease that transition: Student Step Up Day and Parent Orientation, IGNITE Student Orientation, and IGNITE events throughout the year, including the ever-spirited Homeroom Challenge.  We strive to develop and provide a variety of ongoing opportunities for students to learn about and become active and engaged members of our school community.  

The classroom experience is also an area in which we concentrate transition efforts.  As you likely know, teachers at the Middle School are subject specialists, and students travel to each teacher’s classroom; teachers and their students are part of a team--a core tenet of ‘who we are.’  As a Middle School, we believe, and research supports our teaming model which serves as a foundation for a strong learning community characterized by a sense of family.  Teams provide an environment that has been shown to demonstrate improved student achievement, enhanced school climate, increased parent engagement and positive student attitudes (This We Believe, Association for Middle Level Education).  One way we that we help our grade 6 students acclimate to teaming and changing classes is by having them travel together as a homeroom to each academic class.

As we release responsibility to our students throughout their middle grades experience, we remove this structure in grade 7 as students no longer travel by homeroom to each of their classes.  Instead, students have classes with peers from their team and are not limited to members of their homeroom.   

There are two other major changes that students encounter in grade 7 for the first time in the form of curricular changes in grade 7, in particular our pathways in mathematics and foreign language.  Both of these are detailed in the resources found within as part of this “Incoming Grade 7” Parent page.

As always, should you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.  Thank you for your time and support of Hopkinton Middle School.

Alan M. Keller

Principal

Related Arts Site