Placement into Honors Math 7-8 is based on a combination of the following information: NWEA Assessment, teacher recommendation, and/or past academic achievement in mathematics. Students in this course will work to achieve mastery of all Grade 7 and selected 8th Grade TEKS aligned with the Archdiocesan Standards. Being in an honors level course and learning two sets of standards, students are expected to learn all topics more in depth and at a quicker pace than other 7th grade math students.
As outlined in the State Standards, the focus for 7th Grade will be on four critical areas: (1) developing understanding of and applying proportional relationships; (2) developing understanding of operations with rational numbers and working with expressions and linear equations; (3) solving problems involving scale drawings and informal geometric constructions, and working with two- and three-dimensional shapes to solve problems involving area, surface area, and volume; and (4) drawing inferences about populations based on samples.
The selected Grade 8 standards, as outlined in the State Standards, focus on three critical areas: In Grade 8, instructional time should focus on three critical areas: (1) formulating and reasoning about expressions and equations, including modeling an association in bivariate data with a linear equation, and solving linear equations and systems of linear equations; (2) grasping the concept of a function and using functions to describe quantitative relationships; (3) analyzing two- and three-dimensional space and figures using distance, angle, similarity, and congruence, and understanding and applying the Pythagorean Theorem.
The standards above may seem overwhelming; however, many of the selected Grade 8 standards are extensions of the Grade 7 standards. Therefore, by exploration and extension of 7th Grade TEKS, students learn Grade 8 standards. Students who successfully complete this course are eligible to enroll in Algebra I as 8th graders.