THE SIGNET PROGRAM

SIGNET stands for Students In Gifted Needs Education Today.

Fourth and fifth grade students who are identified as gifted are placed in the SIGNET program.  Pattie SIGNET students meet in the gifted resource room for two half days each week.  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.

ALGEBRA

Fourth and fifth grade SIGNET students participate in a Hands-On-Algebra program where they learn to solve equations involving positive and negative numbers.  In solving these equations, students learn many of the properties that are introduced in a beginning level algebra course.

ODYSSEY OF THE MIND

Each week in SIGNET there is an Odyssey of the Mind competition. 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.

NEWS TEAMS

SIGNET students keep up with current events and have an opportunity to participate in news team competitions.  The Potomac News is delivered to our class every Monday.

TAG (Techniques for Achieving Goals) 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.

COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY

SIGNET students have opportunities to go beyond the required curriculum and learn some advanced computer skills.  They incorporate computer technology in many of their projects and use the Internet as a tool for research. They are encouraged to become proficient in using Word, advanced applications of PowerPoint, Excel, Publisher and HTML coding for web pages. Four of the fifth grade SIGNET student teams who entered the ThinkQuest Junior web page contest last year were semi-finalists. Although SIGNET students may not enter this contest every year, they will still have opportunities to learn how to do web pages.

2000 SIGNET web pages

FIELD TRIPS

Students in SIGNET go on field trips once or twice a year.   Field trip destinations vary each year according to units of study.

 

LEARNING CENTERS

The Pattie SIGNET program offers a variety of learning centers and independent study. Most of these centers correlate with or extend beyond the county SOLs (Standards of Learning).  Here are some of them:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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