I am a first year teacher hired this year to teach both honors and top level
(level 1) middle school physical science classes. Unfortunately, I had no
idea I was going to be teaching an "honors" class until just a few days
before school, and I am having difficulty as to how to proceed. There are
no longer any teachers in my building teaching this particular curriculum.
Apparently, the prior teacher sometimes did elaborate experiments and I have
been told by the remaining teachers to keep these students "challenged". I
keep saying to myself, "just how do I do that?". Being new, my time to
learn some of these "elaborate" experiments is quite limited and I just
can't sit down to learn how they processed and developed pictures, for
example. They do have one "block" per week which is devoted to strictly a
lab period, so I definitely feel that the administration is expecting
something more than just the standard lab that the non-honors do during
regular class. Also, what about curriculum? Their textbook does seem more
advanced than the one the non-honors are using and basically I have been
covering the additional material within, so my main problem is what to do
with the lab periods.

Any help would be appreciated. Plus any links, resources, ideas from the
web would definitely be useful for this honors group.

Thanks,
Arsenti

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