A student-led program at MICDS · Grades 7 & 8
Small-group meetings where middle schoolers learn practical systems for starting assignments, managing their time, breaking down big projects, and keeping track of their own progress.
Built for students with ADHD, open to any 7th or 8th grader. No diagnosis required.
Momentum is built as standalone meetings, not a course. Every meeting teaches one complete skill, and your student leaves holding a finished one-page tool. Join at any point. Miss a meeting. Nothing falls apart.
The project was assigned three weeks ago. It’s due Thursday. It’s being started Wednesday night — not because your child doesn’t care. They’ve spent three weeks quietly worrying about it.
Maybe at your house it looks different. The planner filled out for one week in September and blank ever since. Homework that takes three hours one night and twenty minutes the next. A capable kid — teachers keep using that word — whose results don’t match what you know is there.
The usual explanation is effort: try harder, care more, take it seriously. Watch closely and that’s rarely what’s going on. Work goes undone when a task is vague (“work on the essay” has no first move), when a deadline is distant (two weeks away isn’t real yet), or when a project is so big that starting anywhere feels wrong.
Those are structure problems, and structure problems have practical fixes. Momentum teaches students to restructure the work — make the task specific, make the time visible, turn the deadline into a plan, make progress something you can see — instead of trying to white-knuckle their way through it.
Each meeting teaches one of these, in no particular order. Each one works on its own.
A stalled assignment usually isn’t too hard — it’s too vague. This tool is for finding the smallest real action that gets it moving: something concrete enough to do in the next five minutes.
“Work on the science project” becomes “open a doc and write three possible topics.”
Leaves with: a five-minute-move card — a pocket routine for turning any stalled assignment into a first action.
Homework expands to fill the evening when it has no edges. Students learn to work in short, fixed blocks — and to test their own time estimates against a clock. Finding out how far off your guesses are is more useful than it sounds.
Guess the worksheet will take twenty minutes. Time it. Find out it took forty-five.
Leaves with: a personal working block and an estimate log.
A due date tells you when something is due. It says nothing about when to do the work. Students take a real upcoming assignment and build backwards from its deadline into steps with dates on them.
A report due in two weeks becomes: finish the book by Friday, outline over the weekend, two paragraphs a night after that.
Leaves with: a backwards-planning calendar, built from one of their real assignments.
Long work feels like nothing is happening, even when plenty is — and that feeling is what makes students quit halfway. The fix is to make progress physical: something to fill in, cross off, or move. This tool includes the part most systems skip — what to do after a skipped day, because there will be skipped days.
A reading log with one box per chapter beats “I’m somewhere in the middle of the book.”
Leaves with: a progress tracker and a restart rule.
The four tools stand alone, and they also add up: a student who collects them ends up with a small working system they built for themselves. But there is no sequence and no prerequisite — any one of them, alone, is worth the meeting it takes to learn.
Meetings run Mondays and Thursdays, 3:45–4:30 p.m., in the Black and White Hallway.
You should know exactly what you’d be signing your child up for — and what you wouldn’t be.
I’m Felipe Ferreira, an upper-school student at MICDS. I was diagnosed with ADHD in high school, and most of what Momentum teaches I built for myself first — out of necessity, by trial and error, over a couple of years. The trial and error is the part I’d like to spare younger students. The tools themselves are simple. Nobody handed them to me in 7th grade, and I think somebody should have.
Two things worth being clear about. Momentum is built around ADHD — these are the tools I actually use — but a diagnosis isn’t a ticket in: the tools are ordinary work habits, and any 7th or 8th grader who wants them is welcome. And the program isn’t about me — meetings run on the students’ actual assignments, not my story.
Momentum is sponsored by Ms. Taylor-Alonso, a MICDS faculty member, who oversees the program.
No. Momentum is built with ADHD in mind, but the tools are ordinary, practical work habits — anyone can use them. Nobody is asked why they’re joining.
Nothing is lost. Every meeting is self-contained — one complete skill, taught start to finish — so there’s no sequence to fall behind on. A student who joins late isn’t behind anyone.
Yes. Ms. Taylor-Alonso, a MICDS faculty member, sponsors Momentum and oversees the program. [ADULT PRESENCE AT MEETINGS — TBD]
A finished one-page tool from every meeting they attend: a five-minute-move card, an estimate log, a backwards-planning calendar, a progress tracker. Ask to see it.
Some won’t, and that’s expected. The tools are independent, so one that doesn’t fit can be dropped without affecting the others. The honest goal is a small set of tools your child actually uses — two used daily beat four used never. Nobody is graded on loyalty to a method.
No. Momentum is free.
The interest form takes about two minutes and doesn’t commit you to anything — it puts you on the list to hear when meetings are scheduled. A parent or a student can fill it out.
Rather ask a person first? Email me: fferreira@micds.org
