7th Grade

After rotating through each art course in sixth grade, seventh and eighth graders choose from a diverse range of semester-long, cross-graded art offerings. These courses span across various disciplines including drama, media art, music, studio art, and woodshop, providing students with the freedom to explore their interests in depth.

Some essential questions for seventh grade students include: 

• How do we make music together?
• How does performance benefit performers?
• Can I engage with my class as a unique community of people within the school?
• Can I help someone and be helped by someone?
• How do the Elements of Design reveal how we make imagery and ideas that we value?
• How do I consider my audience?

Music: Students can immerse themselves in music through various courses tailored to their interests, such as performance-focused classes like Music Performance and Musical Theatre or the more analytical Musicology and Composition. In performance classes, students enhance their musical techniques and build their stage presence through collaborative rehearsals, preparing them for exciting showcases in front of peers and at school assemblies with a range of pieces from musical numbers to contemporary covers. Meanwhile, the Musicology and Composition class offers a deep dive into the history of popular American music across its seven main genres, coupled with an introduction to music theory concepts such as chord progressions and form. Using tools like GarageBand, students not only cover songs but also create original compositions, thus developing both their technical skills and creative prowess.

Studio Art: Students begin the year learning how to sketch and contour portraits of themselves and their peers.  This prepares them for their first major project, the "3D Foam Core Self Portrait." Students have to problem solve how to create a 3D relief portrait of their side profile out of foam core. Students then transition to learning how to draw and contour a series of still life drawings. This helps prepare them and a partner for a final still life drawing of two objects, one from each partner. Students are then introduced to a new material called green foam.  Students learn relief carving and create an original 3D sculpture with inspiration from artists like Jeff Koons and KAWS.  Students engage in beginning, middle and final critiques, as well as artist statements for each completed original artwork.  Students also document their artwork for future reference.

Woodshop: Students make band-saw boxes. This challenging project helps students become comfortable with a bandsaw, an essential power tool, and involves an intricate sequence of cuts, using beautiful but otherwise unusable pieces of wood. Students also propose and build small projects of their own design once their assigned work is complete.

Seventh grade English is designed to support students in their enjoyment of reading and writing while teaching and fostering the skills necessary for literary analysis, effective verbal and written communication, supportive collaboration, and logical and creative thinking.

An overarching theme is “hear my voice”, and curricular lenses include environmental and/or social justice; reading genres; poetry; and diverse perspectives.

Students use these lenses to answer essential guiding questions, including: 

• If I don’t tell my story, who will?
• Who is telling the story? Who has been silenced?
• What is justice? What roles do laws and individuals play in creating a just society?
• How do people recognize and combat injustice?
• How can constraints on form encourage creativity and original thought?

The curriculum evolves from year-to-year in response to current events, as well as students’ needs and interests. In broad terms, students develop their reading skills by engaging in two literature circles; one whole-class novel; two or three independent-choice, genre-specific book projects. Students develop their writing through narrative, expository, and creative writing, as well as poetry. Additionally, students review a wide array of writing conventions to help solidify mechanics.

Students’ experiential learning includes:

• English and Science collaboration at Hyla Woods, using field study, scientific testing, literature, and writing to determine if an ecosystem is healthy
• Publishing an anthology of poetry
• Optional participation in multi-school poetry slam collaboration (SlamBoo)

In seventh grade, students research lifestyle choices in areas of the world with the longest lifespans to determine what similar ways of eating, exercising, and being that they could introduce into their own lives. The developmental theme is “relationships,” and the curricular feature is “healthy choices.”

Students use these lenses to answer essential guiding questions, including:

• What are my current lifestyle habits?
• How do my emotions and physical well-being affect my relationships?
• How do my choices today impact my future?
• What is power and who has it?

Students are asked what healthy habits they have now, and what habits they could change to improve their health. They learn how various substances impact the developing teenage brain and how to use substance abuse information to make healthy and informed decisions for themselves.

In looking at how reproduction works, students learn how to care for their reproductive systems. They examine ways to prevent sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy, and how to understand the emotional aspects of becoming intimate. Students also study non-communicable diseases and learn how to differentiate between bacterial and viral infections.

In terms of digital citizenship, students will learn about media balance by evaluating their digital footprint. Topics covered include how media impacts our brains, extensive data sharing, privacy, cyberbullying, and responding to hate speech online. Through activities, demos, videos, and group/class discussions, students will explore how these concepts and philosophies apply to their own life. Students will be encouraged to think and act from a place of thoughtful interactions and decision making through understanding the effect it can make on their lives.
 

In seventh grade math, students extend their knowledge on ratios and proportionality by applying  their learning with transformational geometry.

They study rigid transformations and congruence, then scale drawings, dilations, and similarity (this provides background for understanding the slope of a line in the coordinate plane). Next, they expand their ability to work with linear equations in one and two variables and deepen their understanding of equivalent expressions. Students learn how to utilize technology to do “messy” math using data (collected or researched), create and plot scatterplots, and finding a line of best fit to understanding context for slope and the vertical intercept. Then, students discover through application how linear equations represent variables by using equations, tables, and graphs, and make connections across these representations. Building on their understanding of a solution to an equation in one or two variables, students understand what is meant by a solution to a system of equations in two variables. They learn that linear relationships are an example of a special kind of relationship called a function. Finally, students extend the definition of exponents to include all integers, and in the process codify the properties of exponents.

Every day in math, students are provided prompts that require them to ask questions of one another and make connections to previous content knowledge. Students collaborate together to create their understanding of the new prompts, and the teacher, acting as a guide, helps synthesize and formalize the lesson. At the end of the unit, students have the opportunity to apply their learning using projects and/or assessments. 

Skills and understandings students gain include:

• A deep conceptual understanding of numerical and variable relationships
• Analytical and abstract reasoning
• Skill in symbolic representation, generalization, and computation
• Ability to apply foundational elements in the context of real-world problem-solving
• Understanding of the recognition, generalization, and symbolic description of patterns using variables, expressions, and equations

Seventh grade students continue studying the language they selected in sixth grade. The developmental theme is “deepening understanding of the target language,” and the curricular feature is “beginning to see connections between target language and other cultures.”

Students use these lenses to answer essential guiding questions that include:

• How do I become a resourceful, independent language learner?
• How do I transfer my skills to new contexts and situations?

Students increase their vocabularies and are expected to speak the target language more frequently in class. They expand their understanding of grammar, verb conjugations, nuances of expression, and writing longer pieces. Students are expected to increase their capacity to work independently and have more voice in project decisions.

French: Students engage with the French language in a variety of contexts that simulate real-world situations and require dynamic and interactive written, verbal and auditory involvement. They develop skills that help them describe holidays, foods and digital arts, all while exploring realities of varied Francophone cultures around the world. By the end of February, students are able to successfully navigate basic social interactions on familiar topics – making requests, giving advice, and talking about the world around them in increasingly refined ways. 

Mandarin: Students continue to add to their repertoire of characters, vocabulary words, and grammatical structures, and learn to read and write longer sentences.

Spanish: Students view and respond to two films that highlight prejudice, as well as linguistic and cultural miscommunication, all within the context of Mexican-American history. 

Seventh graders build upon fundamentals learned in the sixth grade and progress into more detailed aspects of each unit, including strategy in game play. Students are able to refine their basic skills to increase success and continue to build self-confidence.

Students are able to apply what they have learned by answering essential guiding question that include:

• How does my presence and social behavior impact the group?
• How do I productively communicate with my teammates in a way that allows us to achieve greater success?
• How does my attitude and effort impact the chosen activity and my relationship with peers?

Several examples of physical activities that we provide include dancing, jogging, running, jumping, throwing, catching, and walking. 

Students explore ecology, energy, motion, and the Earth in seventh grade. The developmental theme is “re-connecting to the scientific process,” and the curricular features are “Earth’s interconnected spheres: hydrosphere, atmosphere, geosphere, biosphere.”

Students use these lenses to answer essential guiding questions, including:

• How do Earth’s systems connect and how does this make this planet the place for life?
• How do humans use science to innovate, to solve problems, and to understand their world and the universe beyond?
• How do we affect our environment and how does it affect us?

Students dive into a field-based ecology unit and focus on what an ecosystem is and how it works, how organisms interact with each other and their environment, and how to identify a healthy ecosystem.

Building upon the ecology work, students look more closely at how energy flows into and throughout an ecosystem by tracing electromagnetic radiation from the sun and following the pathway of its transformation through the life-giving processes of photosynthesis and cellular respiration on Earth.

The focus shifts to Newton’s laws of motion to answer such questions as, “Why do things move and why do they stop?” “How can physics send humans to space?” “How do engineers work together to imagine, construct, and test their designs in the face of resource, time, and financial limitations?”

Finally, students ponder and examine the nature and dynamism of the Earth beneath their feet. They investigate how the analysis of seismic waves enables scientists to infer the structure and characteristics of Earth’s layered interior. Students then examine the evidence for continental drift via plate tectonics, and they investigate the ways in which tectonic plates move and the resulting geologic landforms and events.

Students’ experiential learning includes:

• Hyla Woods English and Science collaboration: using field study, scientific testing, literature, and writing to determine if an ecosystem is healthy
• Working on competing teams to design, construct, and launch their very own model water rockets
• A week-long class trip to Mt. St. Helens to see geologic principles up-close and connect to earlier ecology work while examining nature’s recovery following the eruption.

The theme of seventh grade Humanities, known as “Land, Power, and Conquest,” is designed around a series of core questions.

• How do we become critical consumers of information? 
• How have racism, and othering, become a part of our human inheritance?
• What does land mean to us, and to our human ancestors?
• What sources of power existed across Middle Ages civilizations? Why does this matter to us today?
• What were the causes and impacts of conquest and enslavement in the Middle Ages (and beyond)?

Through this study, students learn and develop the skills of a courageous historian, thinking and writing routines, how to utilize and cite sources, and how to communicate ideas using evidence and research.

• Socratic Seminars
• Inquiry projects on topics of choice