School Smarts by Brooks Whitney. Section 10 E: Youth (gr. 6-8), Growing Your Skills. An American Girl book. This clever book for girls gives them all the right answers to homework, teachers, popularity and more. It offers short multiple choice questions to help girls define their learning styles, assumptions about school and friends, and common school problems. It is colorful and very appealing. Chapters cover preparing your study space, classroom listening tips, teacher troubles, memorization tips, how to take notes, how to work in a group, making new friends, how to avoid being overly influenced by a clique, how to include others in a group, going to a new school, how to tackle homework, study and report styles, studying for tests and test-taking tips.
Late elementary and middle school years are often stressful and confusing because fewer worksheets, and more studying and long-range assignments require greater and greater levels of effort and better time management. At the same time these are years when every girl wants to be popular and accepted, and cliques are formed to exclude others. It is a time of shifting and evolving friendships, and learning to stand on one’s own. Most kids look back in middle school as painful for this reason. So any help they can get to deal with these common problems is helpful and affirming. By high school girls have often settled down and are less catty and mean. By this time girls have often found friends who have more in common with them, who share an interest, or who have valuable personal qualities like dependability and loyalty rather than mere popularity, nice clothes or the newest cell phones. In high school many girls begin to identify their individual interests and passions, and begin to blossom as they attain new levels of skill, leadership and intellectual curiosity. Don’t despair, middle school girls! Life will get better. Take it from Miss Ginny. And if you need someone to listen to your gripes, come to Miss Ginny and she will listen. She’s been there – believe it or not, she was once a middle school girl. ( )