7th Grade Course Descriptions
A brief description of courses at grade 7
Enriched ELA and Social Studies
Students who are flexible in their thinking, have an open-mindset, and persevere through struggle are ideal candidates for this course.
Reading 1, 2, 3
Reading 1 - Least Intensive
A course for students who qualify for reading services based upon AIMSWEB/STAR. The purpose of Reading 1 is to improve students’ reading comprehension through explicit strategy instruction utilizing short, high-interest texts, extensive independent reading and explicit writing instruction. Students apply reading and writing strategies they have learned to content area texts and writing assignments. Instruction will include recognition of main ideas and details, critical reading skills, and vocabulary improvement. Reading comprehension and study skills are enhanced through the practice of annotating, outlining, mapping, underlining, and summary writing. The goal of this course is to improve reading comprehension, vocabulary skills, and reading fluency in the content areas.
Reading 2
A course for students who qualify for reading services based upon AIMSWEB/STAR and the SRI/SPI who meet the learner characteristics for Scholastic System 44 or Read 180 programs. Instruction will focus on fluency and comprehension skills, as well as explicit vocabulary instruction. Opportunities to practice reading high interest text at students’ instructional levels will be paired with practical strategies to build comprehension. The goal of this course is to increase students’ reading fluency rates, usage of comprehension strategies, and vocabulary knowledge across disciplines.
Reading 3- Most Intensive
Reading 3 is appropriate for students who fall between the fifteenth to fiftieth percentile on the WIST assessment who are in need of explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, decoding strategies, and vocabulary knowledge. Students in Reading 3 meet the learner characteristics for the Just Words Program, a Wilson system for teaching decoding strategies and morphology for middle and high school aged students. Instruction will focus on specific decoding strategies, with a goal of increasing decoding ability, vocabulary knowledge, and fluency rates for an overall increase in reading comprehension.
Math Workshop 7
In this course, students will spend time exploring specific, targeted portions of the 7th grade Common Core curriculum. The majority of the instruction will focus on mastering pre-requisite skills, which will help students better understand grade-level concepts in their general education math class.
Accelerated Math 7/8
In this course, students will spend time exploring the 7th grade Common Core curriculum while continuing to work on problem solving and application to real life situations. The majority of instructional time will focus 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. In addition, they will be presented with 8th grade material that covers rational and irrational numbers, radicals, exponents, scientific notation and transformations.