Lots more kids to befriend, lockers that won’t open and multiple teachers grading you are just some of the concerns elementary students have about entering middle school.

Most times, the parents are even more anxious than their children, says Bill Fasano, executive director of Rhode Island Middle Level Educators.

So school administrators statewide try to make this stressful transition as “smooth as possible” by holding orientation days, question-and-answer gatherings for parents and school-building tours throughout the summer.

Skylar Lopes, 10, makes a dash across the field to a chair where she sat on the balloon to pop it. Behind her are other teammates including Amy Rodrigues, 11, and Megan St. Hilaire, 10.

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The Providence Journal / Kathy Borchers

“Students who feel safe do better in school,” says Glenn J. Piros, principal of Martin Middle School in East Providence, where they went one step further last week by holding a morning field day to introduce 306 fifth graders to the next step up in academia. “This is everybody meeting everybody in a relaxed setting.”

Six East Providence elementary schools feed into Martin. Mixed together in teams of 12, the kids were forced to communicate and work with each other in a variety of games, such as the human knot and a scavenger hunt. The relay race — run to a chair, sit on a balloon until it pops and then race back to tag your teammate — was the clear favorite.

“The balloon race was fun, but I hurt my butt,” Whiteknact Elementary student John Cloutier said. “I’m like 67 pounds, so the balloon wouldn’t pop.”

Assistant principal Steve Prew and three other faculty members began researching how to improve the transition early in the school year. They first surveyed the current sixth graders. Getting lost in a larger school with hundreds more students and a general fear of the unknown topped the list of concerns.

Once a middle school principal, Fasano said going from one teacher in grade school to a team of teachers is also a major concern for the children and parents. He said it is why most districts have smaller learning environments within the schools — the student population at Martin, for example, is broken into three separate “houses” and the kids stay mainly with that group of students throughout the day.

“Once parents understand that setting — that structure — they feel better about the change,” Fasano said.

“[The students’] anxiety about coming up here really wasn’t that bad,” Prew said. “It was the idea of being in a classroom with a lot of people they didn’t know that worried them.”

At Riverside Middle School, the city’s other junior high, principal Sandra Forand said her new sixth graders worry most about whether they’ll be able to open their lockers, so in addition to informational nights, the school has a “locker night” where the students come in to test their lockers.

“We hope you met someone new today,” assistant principal Prew told the fifth graders at the Martin field day. “It is a big place, but we have great teachers that are here to help you. We don’t want any of you to struggle.”

apina@projo.com