6 Fun Electives For Middle School Students

Having multiple choices in hand can make a decision versatile. In school, this opportunity can be availed with a choice of electives. Electives allow middle schoolers to explore more apart from academics. Options like cooking, life skills, and stage arts can be fun and unique fields to opt for. 

In general terms, fun electives are those subjects that middle school students can choose with a facility to come out of regular academics. These are the subjects that a student chooses either on the basis of their interest or to acquire a skill or development of their further professional career. From a foreign language to agriculture, to even being related to academics, these electives not only shape the student’s skills but also helps them in fetching better grades and GPA. 

To educate you further in this aspect, here we came up with a few suggestions to help you out in your schooling years. 

Electives in middle school: What is it, and why is it?

Middle school is considered the crucial level of a child’s journey in school. Being a stage where the individual gets stronger physically and psychologically, stimulating their interests may help them to explore diverse fields before they venture towards their goal in life. Electives in this development stage ensure both learning and passion. 

Dr. Saul McLeod outlined that role confusion may be a crucial crisis in a middle schooler age (12-18years). This implies that the children may need a clear understanding of different aspects, including people, relationships, and responsibilities. With creative electives, they may explore their abilities in multiple roles, making their decision better about where to fit in their society. These electives also help students in deciding the path they would like to take with respect to their jobs and careers. 

These electives range from being artistic in nature to amplifying a child’s musical understanding. It can be instrumental in determining the interests, likes, and dislikes of a child. The chosen electives help the child to venture to learn things apart from certain predefined subjects and give their personal skills a chance to develop. 

Importance of electives in middle school 

Electives are good for the soul of these budding minds. Creativity, passion, self-esteem, and confidence may need special guidance away from strict patterns of learning education. 

Subjects like Science, English, Math, and others may be important, but they need constant use of a textbook, which can often make academics monotonous. Now here comes the role of electives where they give students the opportunity to take a break from regular academics. At the same time, making sure that even those hours aren’t going to waste. 

With teachers being fully committed to the learning of students, it becomes necessary to make sure that electives like drama, singing, dancing, scriptwriting, theater, martial arts, etc, are provided to the students, not just as a break time activity but with real opportunities to grow in those subjects too. 

Since the student will eventually have to churn themselves out in the fast-paced real world soon, middle school offers a breather through these electives where the students can choose their favorite courses, improve and polish their skills, and even look out for a future career in those specialties. 

To enlist a few important attributes that electives add to a student’s life during middle school could be:

1. Experience and Expression 

Not each and every course is offered based on skills that are specialized; some of these may be based on the basic skills that each and every human being should be aware of and trained in. For example, Subjects like home and economics improve the student’s skills in cooking efficiently. These electives also boost other skills like sewing or shopping. These electives give the students an idea and experience of the real world as during these periods, they are able to experience these jobs and chores. 

2. Autonomy 

With protective parenting and schooling, the kids can enjoy the freedom of choosing their own electives. This isn’t just healthy but makes it possible for students to indulge in the process of finding pros and cons associated with a choice, and also helps increase their focus towards something that hasn’t been delivered to them but something that has been chosen by them. 

3. Academic and Extracurricular Goals 

Middle school offers them the chance to consider planning their academic goals well in advance and curate their college applications by indulging in electives that would help them get the courses they aspire for in the future. Consider the options of electives as a room full of one’s favorite and most inspiring personalities, giving them instructions as to what one could do to pursue what they love the most. These courses are often interactive and improve the social skills of the students, which makes them focused on their goals and inspires them to achieve them. 

List of Electives for middle school

While some of these options may be universal to all schools, some of them may be subjective to the resources available to schools in order to provide them to the students.

1. Life Skills

Life Skills

In layman’s terms, life skills may be inferred as a group of psychological and interpersonal abilities that assist an adult in making informed decisions along with ensuring problem-solving, critical thinking, communication, and better relations. These crucial life lessons that every adult must possess can be mastered at an early age with specific training. This elective ensures to teach the morals of living making students better individuals. 

2. Theater 

Theater

One of the most common electives in schools, theater elective, is more often about music, dance or other stage arts. Sometimes, these are not about learning something new but polishing up attributes that one possesses.  It has been instrumental in instilling confidence among students and developing their communication and leadership skills. The theater is one elective that requires students to work together with each other maintaining the sanctity of a team and thereby representing something bigger than them through their collective love for expressed arts. 

3. Journalism  

Journalism  

This elective is representative of the skills a student needs to learn to be able to publish facts and happening around the world in ethical ways that bring up stories of inspiration, war, love and bravery, inspiration and crime amongst the readers of the world in such a way that it leaves an impact, strong enough. It involves teaching them the steps of identifying and refining the right stories, how one can create them, report them and bring them to the eyes in the most understandable and attention-seeking way possible. 

4. Band/Orchestra

 Band/Orchestra

For the teens who are deeply interested in music and see themselves in a career related to the same can opt for band or orchestra, where they are in close connection to the instruments. These classes allow the students to learn the instruments and get an idea of what a career in music would look like. Not just this, students who wish to learn music or musical instruments as a hobby can also take up this elective. 

5. Physical Education

Physical Education

For the young minds who are equally interested in sports and physical education can opt for this elective as this would provide the students an opportunity to play the sports whilst being in school. Moreover, for the sports enthusiast, this would now be a part of their curriculum where they have the chance to score more in their GPA as it would now include something in which they are highly interested in. 

6. Photography & Video

Photography & Video

A lot of budding photographers like to spend their time with the camera through the early years. For them, this elective seems to be the perfect one. This is because they can not only grasp knowledge about the device, techniques, and much more but spending time with the camera can help them become better at the art. 

A few more electives in various schools could involve Robotics, Website designing, Baking, Middle School Finance, Orchestra, Creative Arts, Culinary Arts, etc.

Do electives have any effect on a student’s GPA?

Grade point average (GPA) determines the extent of one’s understanding of a subject, whether its core or elective. The GPA is a graded evaluation of each and everything that’s learned in school, from electives to any skill being pursued out of the majors chosen for the classroom. 

Consequently, it’s safe to say that both, General education as well as electives have an effect on the GPA a student scores. 

Things to consider while choosing an elective 

With the power of being able to choose the electives comes the responsibility to make a well-informed decision. A decision that has a meaning behind it and not just a selection merely based on conformity or poor skills of selection. Accordingly, Here we shall list down a few tips and insights to remember while choosing one’s elective of choice. 

  • Focus on Exploration:

Not only to assist academically, but electives during school must also be chosen out of the thrill of experimentation to try new challenges. If a school allows for three electives during a semester, it would be wise to choose a middle school elective corresponding or relating to the core curriculum and challenge oneself to try something new through the remaining two electives. 

  • Maintain Balance:

As discussed above, the wise choice is always to balance the options being taken into consideration. If the student is at the liberty of making multiple choices, the right way forward would be to choose courses that are both liberating and stimulate growth and development. 

  • Pursue your Passions:

In a scenario of multiple electives, a pick that enhances and supports one’s passion can help a student feel at ease through the grilling hours of middle school, with a satisfying thought of getting to do something they truly love at the end of the day. 

  • Prioritize the Selections:

It’s not necessary that every choice we make would yield the results that we might be looking for. Even after making informed decisions, it still leaves a scope of going haywire, maybe because of the availability of resources at the institution. Accordingly, having multiple selections with a set priority can help an individual switch their choice for another elective after a semester and eventually try something new. 

  • Explore and Strengthen College Applications:

Most of the decisions made in school and college are often crucial for students in their later life. When it comes to decisions in electives, they often are driving factors for college preferences later. With a good choice of elective, they can get a chance to explore in-depth the area of interest, confirm and then choose the right college. For instance, if a student is interested in cooking, they can choose such an elective in middle school to evaluate if they can do it. If yes, then they can choose a related course. 

Conclusion

Electives reduce the pressure on the educators of core subjects as well, since most of the elective subjects already have application-based learning that’s based on the core subjects. For example; Middle school engineering would require students to use their knowledge of math and science to build things while offering amusement simultaneously.

These years have a strong impact on the development of personality and social circle an individual chooses in the future. Moreover, general education, as well as electives, have an effect on the GPA a student scores. Check out the above-mentioned insights to get a better idea of fun electives.

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