Month: August 2015
Underperforming Students and Rolling Admission at Oak Hill Academy
It is time for a parent to parent blog entry. This is the time of year when parents around the country are having those late night, kitchen table discussions to evaluate how this new school year has begun. Initial grade reports may have already, or soon will, come out and all of the intentions going into the school year are being checked. Because I have kids of my own, I’m very familiar with this time-honored ritual. Also, because Oak Hill Academy has rolling admission AND our wheelhouse is in working with students who are not working to their potential, I am very attuned to this time of year. I understand the frustration, felt by some at this point in the year, as the goals and good intentions agreed to during the summer appear to be slipping away. Your student may even be entering that pattern of de-motivation at the prospect of another year of disappointing grades and habits that you’ve seen before. Deep down, they know they are capable of so much more and you’ve probably determined that a change in setting may in order.
Our approach at Oak Hill Academy rests on a very important principle: “There is no such thing as an underachieving child, only an unmotivated one.”
The intentional structure and support, found at Oak Hill Academy, enables us to work well with a variety of learning challenges and mindset challenges and to provide the opportunities for real academic, personal and spiritual growth. Our small school size means small classrooms where students and teachers establish meaningful relationships. The feeling of being away at school is often empowering to the Oak Hill Academy students. They own their successes, develop pride in taking care of business with the learning support and organized structure we provide and they begin to expect more from, and for, themselves. This is a very real opportunity for the student to redefine themselves.
If you are considering a change for your student at this critical juncture, let’s have a conversation about Oak Hill Academy. We are very experienced with integrating new students throughout the first semester and some of the greatest success stories begin this way. It is very easy to find out more and I welcome this personal discussion and opportunity to learn more about your student’s needs, challenges and goals. Oak Hill Academy is The Turning Point for many students and this may be precisely the point in time to consider a change in their trajectory.
New Course Offering at Oak Hill Academy: Critical Reading for College
A new class has been added to the English Department at Oak Hill Academy in response to the identifiable needs of our students as they enter college: Critical Reading for College. This course is designed to assist students in improving their skills in critical reading specifically as it applies to types of reading they will be doing as college freshman and as applicants for college. A special emphasis will be placed on the redesigned “Evidence Based Reading and Writing” section of the SAT.
The relationship between writing skills and improved reading skills is the basis of this class. Students will review a variety of writing conventions – persuasive, research, comparative, and editorial to name a few. Due to the heavy volume of reading and writing, especially in introductory level college classes, we’ve identified this as point of emphasis in preparing our students for college. This new class represents a response to information we’ve received through a continued contact with our alumni base and feedback they’ve provided as to the most practical preparation we can offer to our students as they become college freshman. The goal with this class is continue to grow our student’s preparedness with an increased understanding of sentence structure, flow, and transitioning elements in the kind of writing (and by extension, reading) they will encounter most in college.
oakhilladmission.wordpress.com 
You must be logged in to post a comment.