What is Tribe Time?
Each morning, Larned Middle School students meet with a teacher and a group of about ten peers for 20 minutes. As we work with our students, we constantly try to find ways to help the students have success at the middle school level and transform that to future achievement at the high school and beyond. A few years ago, our Building Leadership Team had the opportunity to visit another school with high success rates despite students coming with large amounts of trauma in their backgrounds. The school had plans in place to help their students with the daily challenges they faced and our team took the initiative to bring some ideas back to LMS. One of the best ideas centered around small groups of students getting to know each other as well as a school staff member. Students achieve more with a connection to at least one caring adult in their school setting.
Each day when the students meet with their Tribe teacher, they have different activities and ways to build relationships with other students as well as an adult here at school. Staff facilitate some character education activities, grade checks, finding out about student’s weekends, and other ways to welcome students to school. Our teachers share activities with each other to take back to their small groups. One of our major goals focuses on students becoming more comfortable with school and striving to do their best each day. Our Tribes even challenge each other to different games to build camaraderie and connections between other groups of students. So each day, our students start their day with an important 20 minutes to help them build skills for success at LMS and beyond.