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Mathematics

The primary goal of mathematics education is to ensure that every student will become mathematically literate. This implies that the student is a good critical thinker and problem solver, is confident in his/her ability to do mathematics, is able to communicate and reason mathematically, and values mathematics. In order to achieve these goals, the mathematics curriculum will engage students as much as possible with exercises which are drawn from and directly applicable to daily situations. The use of calculators and/or computers to enhance and enrich the mathematics program is encouraged at all levels.

In the early grades, K-3, the focus will be on building skills such as oral counting, number recognition and sequencing, recognizing and working with money, measuring, telling time, learning to use a calendar, identifying times of day and seasons, identifying shapes, sorting, patterning, and graphing real objects and pictures. Skills will be integrated and build upon one another each year until students master basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division facts; can create, read, and write observations from graphs; identify sorting and patterning rules, lines of symmetry, and volume of a standard container; picture, name, and order fractions; identify angles; identify and draw polygons.

In grades 4-6, the focus expands to include provisions for establishment of skills in translating ideas into mathematical language and symbols, learning to estimate, developing independence in solving meaningful problems, collecting data and representing the results, and examining notions of elementary probability and statistics. Continued emphasis whole number concepts and computation, patterning rules, and measurement continues. Work with fractions, mixed numbers, decimals, percents and ratios, area and perimeter measurement is expanded.

In the seventh and eighth grades, the skills developed in the elementary grades are reviewed and extended. Concepts, procedures, and vocabulary that students will need in order to be successful in upper-level algebra and geometry courses will be introduced and continually practiced. The topics emphasized at these grade levels are: operations on rational numbers, beginning algebra, informal geometry, measurement, graphs, scale drawings, elementary probability, statistics, and problem solving.