Schools in U.S / Canada

[helios]

Hi,

I am working on a personal project and I would appreciate it if people from the U.S. or Canada will help me with this.

The project I'm working on mainly concerns an online application which will be used by teachers and their students. Now one of the main features will allow the teacher to add a number of classes that he/she is teaching. In most European countries each class usually contains the same students for a whole year. ex: think Class 2A of 1997 contained a number of students, so Class 2A, throughout 1997 contained the same list of students.

Now I was just wondering whether this scenario would still be valid in other countries. Do schools in other countries have the same students in one class throughout the same year? It does not matter which country although I am particularly interested in American and Canadian school systems for which this application will be mainly aimed.

thanks

helios

 

[binary]

Most schools have a 2-month long summer break. The school "year" runs for the 10 months from September to near the end of June (the following calendar year.) For example, a child beginning grade 6 in September 2008 would finish grade 6 in June 2009.

I've heard that some schools have recently experimented with running through the summer, and taking their break at another time of the year (or having a few shorter breaks instead of a single long one.) For those schools, I'm not sure when their "school year" begins or ends.

Generally, children in lower grades - kindergarten (age 4-5) through grade 6 (age 11-12) keep together as a class within the school year, but may be mixed up between school years. For example, if Betty and Veronica start together in grade 4 in September, they will share the same class until June. However, next year, in grade 5 they may be in different classes. Of course this is true only if the school is large enough to have multiple grade 5 classes. I some smaller towns there may be only one class of each grade level.

Usually, by their senior years (grade 12, age 17-18), students have a "home room" class where they meet for morning anouncements and such, but after that, they go their separate ways to whichever class they have next. For example, Betty and Veronica may be in the same "home room" and meet there every day at 9 AM. After morning anouncements, Betty may go to Chemistry while Veronica goes to Physics. They may meet up again during the day, if they share the same Literature or Math class for example. The transition from the lower grades style of everyone-together-all-day-long to this generally style occurs in grade 8, 9 or 10.

There are always exceptions to what I've written. For example, a remote smaller school may not operate in the same way a large inner-city school does.

 

[helios]

Thanks Binary. So much details, you pretty much covered everything i wanted to know. So the 'home-room' class is not an actual physical class but rather a way of grouping students of the same age together. So even if, for example, Veronica is in the same home-room class as Sarah, the two of them might go to separate classes (History, Geography etc...). Did I understand that correctly?

 

[promesse]

Do schools in other countries have the same students in one class throughout the same year?

Depends on the type of school. In Canada, kids in an elementary school class will be together for the entire year, since there is mostly one main class (other than music, but it's the same set of students there too). In middle school, you have have to move around from class to class, so you have different teachers, but if you are in a 'core' (a group of people who are in all your classes), the same kids will be in all your classes.

In high school, it's different. First, if you go by semesters, like mine, you have 4 classes for the first semester. You go to each class everyday, but there are a different set of kids for each of the 4 classes. Same with second semester. We do have homerooms, but they are our first period class.

So in Canada, only elementary schools keep the 'one class' idea.

 

[helios]

I'm from Europe and yes, in my country the same students are in the same class for the whole year. The class is usually given a name, for example: Class 5.3. So if someone asks you: "Which class are you in?", you can answer "I'm in class 5.3". However this does not necessarily mean that the students in the same class study the same subjects. Usually they split up during different times of the day to go to different classes; for example: Student A from class 5.3 goes to history-class while Student B (also in class 5.3) may go for Math-class...So it doesn't work this way in North America? I was hoping that students were somehow grouped together in some way since the application I'm working on requires the teachers to group students together in a class.

 

[binary]

Your named class, such as 5.3. ... Here they may have a name, such as 8A, 8B, 8C, etc. (for the grade 8 classes.)

 

[helios]

Thanks y'all. I can now continue working on the project, i had stalled for a few weeks because of this problem and was trying to do some research myself on foreign educational-systems, then it hit me that i could just ask on my favorite forum so thanks again