Grade 7
The Grade 7 program at Derby is thoughtfully crafted with a year full of collaborative endeavors and design-thinking opportunities.
The increased intellectual challenges help push students to employ strong organizational and leadership skills and to develop pride and independence along their learning journey. Recognizing this as a crucial point in adolescence where strong peer relationships are so essential, the team of teachers and advisors provides consistent support while guiding students through new and demanding collaborative experiences. The year culminates with final exams and an interdisciplinary project between English and history.
Grade 7 Highlights
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Math Club, Math Team, AMC8 Math Challenge
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Wellness Collaborative
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Pals
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GOALS (Get Out And Learn Something) Electives
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Winter Term: Studios with Authentic Projects Related to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
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Electives in Visual, Performance, and Applied Arts
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UNICEF Project in Math Studio
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Resource Period
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Social Emotional Learning in Advisory
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Overnight Nature’s Classroom Outdoor Education Trip
In the Classoom
The science curriculum focuses on the skills and process of science. Energy transformations, sound, light, and electromagnetic waves and human body systems are investigated by our Grade 7 science students. Lab work, performance assessments, debates, and research projects help students gain an understanding of the nature of science.
The Grade 7 world language program builds upon previous instruction in Spanish, French, or Latin, incorporating more advanced vocabulary and grammar concepts, exploring cultural issues, and developing more confidence in reading, pronunciation, and basic conversational skills.
In our Grade 7 math program, students are challenged to strengthen their number sense, critical reasoning and problem-solving skills, and ability to work with abstract concepts. Students in Standard and Honors level classes develop a solid foundation of order of operations, operations with integers and rational numbers, evaluating expressions, solving multi-step algebraic equations and inequalities, ratios and proportions, similar figures, percent, graphing and interpreting and writing linear functions, operations with monomials, basic geometry, Pythagorean Theorem, special right triangles, and volume and surface area. Students study math in conjunction with real-world applications, including a Winter Term project. Honors students are introduced to additional topics related to the core curriculum.
Using independent books and reading journals in Grade 7 English, students practice their close reading skills and become more comfortable with analysis. Student choice for independent reading fosters a stronger love of reading and exposure to different genres. Students write for a variety of purposes with emphasis on the development of analytical and creative writing skills. Students make full use of the writing process and principles of design thinking; breaking essay writing down into parts and steps, and scaffolding to master the basics of the five paragraph essay.
Where did American ideals come from? How did (and how do) some groups struggle to gain the rights promised to them in the Constitution? What is real equality? How has the United States lived up to its ideals? Where has it struggled to live up to those ideals? These are some of the critical questions that students wrestle with in Grade 7 history. Learners will look at the struggle undertaken by many Americans to have rights from the US Constitution fully realized. Focusing on (but not limited to) the crisis of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights Movement, students will analyze the ways in which “We the people” of the Constitution changed over time. Students will become historians by analyzing numerous primary source documents and often questioning the traditional narrative of national and local events.
