Students are offered a variety of opportunities to excel in all areas of the curriculum, participate in independent studies, and actively engage in cooperative learning and problem solving. WARM-UPS Students are given problems to solve that require creative and critical thinking. They work independently and in groups to solve these problems. In solving these equations, students learn many of the properties that are introduced in a beginning level algebra course. Students participate in competitions with their cooperative groups.
Groups change every nine weeks.
Most of the competitions involve short-term problems and are completed the same day. A few of the OM competitions are long-term and take several weeks of active planning and presenting. The Potomac News is delivered to our class every Monday. Units TAG units are fun and challenging. Examples of some of the TAG units we have had are designing web pages, inventions and inventors, learning styles, electing a president and holding a debate, science experiments, stock market simulations, critiquing classical literature, acting in a theater production, learning about Bloom's Taxonomy and using it to design a learning center, the physics of roller coasters, and public speaking.