Grade 7 Scope

How to read this scope

Each unit_id in the frontmatter resolves to a unit file under units/. start_day/end_day map the unit onto the 180-day school year; the list is a continuous sequence from day 1 to day 180 with no gaps or overlaps. domain and pillar name the primary domain(s) and pillar(s) each unit serves. domain_weighting expresses the intended balance of instructional time across the ten domains, in percent of the year. lesson_count counts the core lessons; the days between lessons carry flex time, assessment, integration, and celebration. assessment_plan describes how a learner’s growth is seen and recorded at this level.

Year at a glance

The Grade 7 year is a spiral that deepens what Grade 6 began — and it is the year nuance arrives, when the world stops being made of one thing at a time. Where Grade 6 learned to identify patterns in feeling and to see the self as made of many parts, Grade 7 begins to hold contradiction at once, and to hear the reasons behind a rule. The year opens inward. Feelings, Identity & Purpose builds on Grade 6’s felt-versus-shown reading of emotion: now learners describe mixed or conflicting feelings — happy and sad at once — in precise language, and explain how cultural norms shape which feelings are shown, hidden, or valued. They reflect on how their identity has changed over time and predict the ways it may keep growing, and they recognize stereotypes and labels and explain how these can limit a person’s sense of self. They reflect on a past decision and its consequences to make a better choice next time, and build and follow a personal routine — study, sleep, movement — that supports their own goals. This is the year identity formation intensifies and self-consciousness spikes; the unit treats every self as a changing work in progress, never a label, and holds every question as a question.

My Body, Movement & Wellness then reads the body with new inward precision, building on Grade 6’s mind–body connection. Learners notice and name internal body signals — hunger, fatigue, stress — accurately in themselves, apply strategies such as spacing, timing, and teamwork in a game or sport, and describe how movement changes during puberty and adapt activities to their own changing body. They describe how energy needs differ among bodies and activities, and why restricting food can harm a growing body. The body is taught with dignity and joy, honoring the wide range of bodies and abilities, and the uneven, rapid growth of these years is named as normal, never shameful. Relationships, Empathy & Conflict turns outward into the practice of care at the moment peers matter most. Where Grade 6 distinguished assertion from passivity and aggression, Grade 7 sets and respects personal boundaries and recognizes when a peer has set one, and repairs a relationship after a disagreement by apologizing, listening, and agreeing on next steps. Learners explain how a person’s background, culture, and experiences shape their point of view, and practice empathy across difference by seeking to understand views unlike their own. They examine how online and offline communities differ and how people belong in each, explain how communities change over time and why change can be both hard and good, organize or join a mutual-aid action in their school or community, and reflect on the motives for helping — care, duty, or recognition.

The heart of the year is given to the two great tools of school, now working with real independence and a new critical edge: argument and number. Reading, Writing, Argument & Many Languages builds from Grade 6’s claim-with-counterargument toward evaluation. Learners evaluate a speaker’s reasoning, identifying unsupported claims and asking probing questions, and deliver a presentation adapted to an audience and purpose, using evidence to support their points. They analyze how an author develops characters, setting, and plot — or central ideas — across a text, and evaluate the credibility of a source by checking its author, purpose, and evidence. They develop ideas with relevant, well-chosen details and precise language across a range of genres, and give and use peer feedback to improve a piece of writing, explaining the choices they made. They explain what translation and interpretation are and when each is needed in everyday life, and recognize dialect and accent as natural variation, challenging the idea that one way of speaking is correct — always in the learner’s home language first, with multilingualism held as wealth. Proportions, Rational Numbers, Equations & Chance grows from Grade 6’s ratios, one-step equations, and data summary into the full working of algebra and chance. Learners use proportional relationships — unit rates, scale, and percentages — to solve multi-step problems in real contexts, and perform all four operations with rational numbers, explaining each step of the reasoning. They write and solve two-step equations and inequalities to represent and solve real problems, and identify proportional relationships in tables, graphs, and equations, expressing them in the form y = kx. They construct and describe triangles and other shapes from given conditions and tell when such a shape is impossible, solve problems with scale drawings and circles using the relationship between circumference and diameter, use random sampling to draw conclusions about a population and recognize bias in how data is collected, and investigate chance processes and compute probabilities of simple and compound events. Mathematics remains sense-making with real things, drawn from many traditions, for everyone.

From there the year looks out at the world through the lens of systems — and the difference between what a pattern shows and what it proves. Science: Systems, Evidence & Deep Time deepens Grade 6’s investigation of error and bias into the logic of evidence itself. Learners distinguish correlation from causation and explain why a pattern alone does not prove a cause, and evaluate whether a claim is supported by evidence and identify what further evidence would help. They explain how variation, inheritance, and natural selection shape populations over time using evidence, and describe relationships among species — predation, competition, symbiosis — and how they shape communities. They explain force, mass, and acceleration and use them to describe everyday motion, and describe how waves — sound, light, water — carry energy and how wave properties relate to what we observe. They explain how the atmosphere, oceans, and land interact to shape climate and weather, and how evidence — fossils, rock layers, ice cores — tells the story of deep time and past life. Origins here are offered as models with evidence, held as inquiry alongside other ways of knowing, never as creed. Making, Performing & Designing gives craft to the imagination at the moment abstract reasoning emerges: learners create an artwork that communicates a personal message and revise it after feedback, and explain how perspective, framing, or emphasis shapes what a viewer notices and feels about an image. They perform a piece with attention to dynamics, phrasing, and ensemble and revise after listening to a recording, explain how sound is used in media — film, games, ads — to shape mood and meaning, perform a scene or dance with attention to timing, expression, and ensemble and revise after feedback, and explain how gesture, posture, and spacing communicate meaning without words. They design something with accessibility in mind so more kinds of people can use it and test it for barriers, and explain how a design choice trades off cost, materials, function, and environmental impact. The arts of other cultures are met as living traditions to honor with respectful questions, never as specimens.

Healthy, Safe & Strong: Puberty & Self-Care returns to the body at a turning point. Learners analyze how media images can shape how a person feels about their body and describe a healthy response, critically evaluate food marketing and advertising by telling claims apart from evidence, explain basic first aid for common emergencies — bleeding, burns, choking — and when to seek adult or medical help, and analyze how social media can affect mental health and set personal boundaries for healthy use. Every body, every pace, and every family’s way of eating is honored; the body is taught with dignity, never shame. The final third steps into the wider human story with the tools of the historian and the ethicist. Civilizations, Knowledge Systems & the Human Story explains why historians divide time into periods and compares two different calendars or ways of counting years used by different peoples, and analyzes the multiple causes and consequences of one major change, such as the spread of an invention or a large migration. Learners analyze a scientific or technological achievement from a non-European civilization — mathematics, astronomy, medicine, engineering — and its effect on the world, and compare how two different knowledge systems, such as indigenous ecological knowledge and formal science, understand and care for the natural world. They compare voluntary and forced migration and analyze their causes and effects, explain how geography — rivers, oceans, deserts, mountains — helped connect or separate peoples and shaped the spread of ideas and goods, analyze forms of resistance — protest, boycott, refusal, art, storytelling — and how people choose among them, and explain how colonization affected colonized peoples, including loss of land, culture, and self-rule, with care and accuracy. History is told as a global story from many perspectives, never one people’s triumph.

Ethics, Justice & Shared Power turns those questions inward to the self and the group. Learners apply a simple framework — who is helped, who is harmed, what is fair — to a moral question, and explain how someone’s background, culture, or position can shape what they think is right. They analyze a case of inequality or injustice, identifying who is affected, who benefits, and what would make it more just, and explain what human rights are and analyze a case where they were honored or violated. They analyze how people influence decisions in their society — voting, protest, petitions, organizing — and the limits of each, and explain what civil society is and how groups and movements act for the common good when government does not. They apply restorative steps — listening, taking responsibility, repairing harm — to a real or role-played conflict, and explain how power and hurt can make conflict worse, and how to address them without violence. Questions are held as questions, never answered as dogma. Media, Technology & Our Earth Home closes the outward year by gathering everything together. Learners trace how one technology spread across the world and changed the societies that adopted it, using a non-Western example where possible, and explain the difference between an intended and an unintended effect of a technology. They explain what makes a source trustworthy and compare two sources on the same topic for reliability, and explain the difference between misinformation — false by mistake — and disinformation — false on purpose — with an example of each. They explain how matter and energy move through an ecosystem, such as the carbon in a forest, and are reused rather than created new, describe a symbiotic relationship such as pollination and how both organisms benefit, explain the basic science of climate change — greenhouse gases trapping heat — and the main human activities that add to it, and compare individual and collective actions for caring for the environment, explaining why both matter. The year closes in All of Me, All of Us, gathering every whole person, the caring community they have built, and the living Earth — and looking ahead to Grade 8, where multiple and intersecting identities, the separation of event from thought from feeling, and deliberate management of impulse will carry the same questions further.

Throughout, the four pillars are interwoven. Intellectual awareness (P3) carries the most weight — argument and source evaluation, proportional and rational-number reasoning and chance, and the systems-and-evidence thinking of science are the year’s central work — but emotional and social awareness (P1) grows markedly, for identity formation and peers now matter greatly, and a known, cared-for, and capable body-and-self remains the ground all formal learning stands on (P2). Contextual and ecological awareness (P4) keeps rising: history moves toward multiple causes, knowledge systems, migration, resistance, and colonization; civics toward real dilemmas, human rights, civil society, and restorative justice; and media and ecology toward trustworthy sources, misinformation versus disinformation, symbiosis, climate change, and collective action. Abstract and hypothetical reasoning appear but unevenly — the curriculum introduces them gradually, always with a concrete anchor, structure, and hope. No high-stakes tests anywhere: a learner’s growth is seen through argument and cited reading, number and data work with real things, investigations that tell correlation from causation and weigh evidence, made and performed and designed works, and a portfolio of what they say, make, and do.