We are pleased to be using the CollegeBoard curriculum SpringBoard with all of our students. This curriculum is composed of rigorous standards that represent the content-based critical thinking and reasoning skills expected of students as they enter college or AP course work.  Honors students will be challenged as they study specific strategies in Reading, Writing, Oral Literacy, and Collaboration through thematic units at each grade level.  We expect our Honors’ students in grades 6-8 to have the following skill sets when they leave middle school:

• The ability to engage in close readings of challenging texts.
• The ability to read actively.
• The ability to write expository, analytical, and argumentative essays.
• The ability to recognize ways writers have changed their use of language over time.
• The ability to revise their own writing effectively and to write in both the formal and informal registers.
• The ability to engage in analysis that involves making careful observations of textual detail, establishing connections among those observations, and drawing from those observations a series of inferences leading to a supportable interpretation.

In the Honors classes, students will be asked to go deep in the material, their thinking, discussions and writing as they find evidence to defend their points of view.  Each grade level will build on the previous year and the High School AP classes build on the foundation established in middle school.  Students are given diagnostic tests on a regular basis and instruction and/or difficulty level of texts will be adjusted accordingly. 

Homework:  Students are expected to read a minimum of 30 minutes per day, weekends included, and keep a reading log.  They are to choose books that for the most part are in their Independent reading level. This is one means to address the standards that students read a wide variety of texts and is key to developing written and oral fluency as well as improving comprehension and vocabulary.  Additionally, students will be assigned other homework to complement or enhance class instruction.  Examples might be for students to take a revised draft and enter their final product on the CollegeBoard website for the teacher to score. They may be asked to prepare for a debate or class presentation. 

We are also asking that our Honor level students choose one classic piece of literature to read each trimester.  By the time students are in the 8th grade, we would like them to be able to answer the critical question of what makes a classic piece of literature?  They will include the titles and notes on their thinking about each novel in their Portfolio and in the 8th grade will be required to use that information to write a paper and give examples of what classic literature is.  We would also want them to use that criteria to evaluate whether any books they have read on their own that are not yet classics have the potential to become classics. 

The themes for each of the grade levels are:
6th grade Changes
7th grade Choices
8th grade Challenges
9th grade “Coming of Age”
10th grade “The American Dream”
11th grade World Literature
12th grade Senior English where they will study the concept of truth and they will create and defend a comprehensive research portfolio.

Each grade builds on the previous years’ work and the portfolio will be taken with students to each grade level.