7th Grade English Language Arts

Students will actively listen using agreed-upon discussion rules, recognizing verbal and nonverbal cues while maintaining social awareness and responding accordingly.

Students will actively listen and interpret a speaker’s verbal and nonverbal messages and ask questions to clarify the speaker’s purpose.

Students will work effectively and respectfully in diverse groups by showing willingness to make necessary compromises to accomplish a goal, sharing responsibility for collaborative work, and recognizing individual contributions.

Students will engage in collaborative discussions about what they are reading and writing, expressing their own ideas clearly while building on the ideas of others in pairs, diverse groups, and whole-class settings.

Students will give formal and informal presentations in a group or individually, providing evidence to support a main idea while determining the purpose, content, and form to suit the audience.

Students will summarize alphabetic and/or multimodal texts, including main idea and key details, to demonstrate comprehension within and between texts.

Students will analyze details in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction texts to distinguish genres.

Students will paraphrase a short passage in their own words to demonstrate comprehension.

Students will routinely and recursively prewrite (e.g., develop ideas and plan).

Students will routinely and recursively organize and develop ideas to compose a first draft.

Students will routinely and recursively revise drafts for intended purpose, audience, organization, and coherence (e.g., consistent point of view).

Students will routinely and recursively edit for correct grammar, usage, and mechanics, using various resources.

Students will routinely and recursively publish final drafts for an authentic audience (e.g., publishing digitally, performing, entering contests).

Students will read works written on the same topic from a variety of historical, cultural, ethnic, and global perspectives and compare the methods the authors use to achieve their purposes.

Students will evaluate how perspective (e.g., historical, cultural, ethnic, and global) affects a variety of literary and informational texts.

Students will analyze literary elements to support an interpretation of a text: setting, plot, characters (i.e., protagonist, antagonist), characterization, conflict (i.e., internal, external), point of view (i.e., third person limited and omniscient and second person).

Students will analyze literary devices to support an interpretation of a text: figurative language (i.e., simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole, imagery, symbolism, idiom), sound devices (i.e., onomatopoeia, alliteration), verbal irony.

Students will identify literary elements and devices that impact a text’s theme and mood.

Students will distinguish factual claims from opinions.

Students will analyze how informational text structures support the author’s purpose: compare/contrast, cause/effect, problem/solution, description, sequential.

Students will analyze multiple ideas from a text, providing textual evidence to support their inferences.

Students will compose narratives reflecting real or imagined experiences that: include plots involving complex characters resolving conflicts, unfold in chronological or surprising sequence (e.g., foreshadowing), include a narrator, precise language, sensory details, dialogue, and thoughts to enhance the narrative, use sentence variety to create clarity, emulate literary elements and/or literary devices from mentor texts.

Students will compose informative essays or reports that: objectively introduce and develop topics, incorporate evidence (e.g., specific facts, details, charts and graphs, data), maintain an organized structure, use sentence variety and word choice to create clarity, establish and maintain a formal style, emulate literary devices from mentor texts.

Students will compose argumentative essays that: introduce precise claims, organize claims and evidence in a logical sequence, provide relevant evidence to develop arguments, using credible sources, use sentence variety and word choice to create clarity, establish and maintain a formal style.

Students will analyze the relationships among synonyms, antonyms, and analogies.

Students will use context clues, connotation, and denotation to determine or clarify the meaning of words or distinguish among multiple-meaning words.

Students will use word parts (e.g., affixes, Greek roots, stems) to define and determine the meaning of increasingly complex words.

Students will use a dictionary, glossary, or thesaurus to determine or clarify the meanings, syllabication, pronunciation, synonyms, antonyms, and parts of speech of words.

Students will use precise, grade-level vocabulary in writing to clearly communicate ideas.

Students will select language in writing to create a specific effect according to purpose.

Students will recognize simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences and explain their effects.

Students will recognize and explain the impact on meaning of parts of speech in sentences: nouns, gerunds, subject and verb agreement, cumulative and coordinate adjectives, demonstrative pronouns, vague pronouns (i.e., ones with unclear or ambiguous antecedents), singular they/them/their, correlative conjunctions, adverbs, interjections.

Students will compose simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences to add clarity and variety in their writing.

Students will add clarity and variety to their writing with nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, adverbs, and pronouns.

Students will recognize and correct the following: run-ons, errors in subject and verb agreement, inappropriate shifts in verb tense, and vague pronouns (i.e., ones with unclear or ambiguous antecedents).

Students will write using correct capitalization mechanics.

Students will write using correct end mark mechanics.

Students will write using correct apostrophe mechanics.

Students will use commas to separate words or phrases in a series.

Students will use a colon to introduce a quotation from a source.

Students will use quotation marks to indicate dialogue, quoted material, and titles of works.

Students will use underlining or italics to indicate titles of works, thoughts in narratives, and words in a foreign language.

Students will use a semicolon to punctuate compound and compound-complex sentences.

Students will find and comprehend information (e.g., claims, evidence) about a topic, using their own viable research questions.

Students will find, record, and organize information from a variety of primary and secondary sources, following ethical and legal guidelines.

Students will determine the relevance, reliability, and validity of the information gathered.

Students will formulate and refine a viable research question.

Students will develop a clear, concise thesis statement.

Students will quote and summarize findings following a consistent citation style (e.g., MLA, APA) to avoid plagiarism.

Students will create research papers and/or projects independently for shorter timeframes (e.g., two or three days) and over extended periods of time (e.g., one week).

Students will compare and contrast the effectiveness of techniques used in a variety of alphabetic, aural, visual, spatial, and/or gestural content from various perspectives.

Students will create multimodal content (i.e., alphabetic, aural, visual, gestural and/or spatial) that effectively communicates ideas for an intended audience.

Students will select texts for academic and personal purposes and read independently for extended periods of time.

Students will write independently using print, cursive, and/or typing for various lengths of time, intentionally selecting and combining modes and genres to suit their audiences and purposes.