6-8 Paragon Online

College Preparation through Rigor and Relevance

Mercury’s Paragon Online for Grades 6‐8 is a unique interdisciplinary liberal arts program that
combines the rigor of a classical education with the relevance required by contemporary society.
Students learn about character, ethics, empathy and self‐esteem implicitly by studying the world’s
great heroes, both canonical and unsung, and by stepping into the shoes of great historical figures,
both real and imaginary. Paragon looks to the past to prepare students to become the architects of
tomorrow.

Paragon Teaches Rich Content through Constructivist Strategies

The content‐rich Paragon Curriculum is interdisciplinary, engaging, discovery‐based, student centered,
and multi‐cultural. Paragon fulfills state and national history, social studies, civics and geography
standards. The college preparatory liberal arts program at the heart of the Mercury model integrates
the visual and performing arts and provides an exciting project‐based forum in which students apply
their literacy and problem‐solving skills.

With a hands‐on approach, Paragon addresses students’ multiple intelligences and individual learning
styles. Through this engaging curriculum, students gain historical information, and come to understand
the expansive potential open to them if they can identify with early clarity their individual strengths
and sense of purpose.

Rather than teach history in bits and pieces in arbitrary sequence, Paragon’s fully integrated,
chronological approach demonstrates to students how one idea builds on and evolves into another.
Mercury students develop through Paragon Online a larger picture of history and the associated
interrelationships between cultures and ideas. Rather than memorize names, dates, and events in
isolation, students recall the sequential circumstances surrounding these events and remember more
readily both factual information and conceptual relevance.

Paragon Curriculum is Practical Because it is Meaningful

Students learn connected networks of knowledge, skills, beliefs, and attitudes that they will find useful
both in and outside of school. The significance and meaningfulness of the content is emphasized both
in how it is presented to students online, how it is developed through activities ‐ both online and off,
with digital media and with visual and performing arts integration ‐ and how it is authentically
assessed. Step‐by‐step lesson plans are organized around essential questions that have captivated
thinkers for millennia and that will continue to fascinate students, thereby connecting them with the
content more profoundly, more personally, and more purposefully.

Paragon provides the trick play in practice where all of the skill building comes together in authentic
learning and where the rigor feels far more like play than work.