What Language Arts Should a 7th Grader Know?
Seventh grade is a year of highly visible progress in reading, writing, and language arts. By the end of seventh grade, students should:
Develop complex writing skills.
Constructively critique their own and other’s writing.
Apply punctuation, grammar, and syntax skills.
Read with fluency, with focus on comprehension.
Recognize and apply grade appropriate vocabulary.
Compare books to their movie version and describe how the message is affected.
Compare and contrast texts from different authors presenting the same topic.
Write more in-depth research papers with citations and quotes from multiple sources.
The ideal curriculum will meet each of these 7th grade language arts standards while using multimedia and engaging projects to keep students motivated to learn.
Reading Goals/Objectives
Middle schoolers are presented with increasingly complex texts in all subjects, so they must master reading skills that will bridge across all curriculum areas. A successful 7th grade language arts curriculum will focus on reading skills such as:
Using strategies to construct the meaning of unfamiliar words
Use text evidence to analyze, infer, and synthesize ideas.
Giving an objective summary of a text
Analyze elements and style of different genres of literature
Determining the theme of a text as well as the author’s purpose
Identifying and distinguishing between cause and effect in literature
In the middle school years, students are learning how to adapt their written communication to the intended audience, task, or purpose. This involves many different skills including:
Learning how to write an analytical argument and support it with claims and evidence
Quoting and paraphrasing information from sources
Developing topics with relevant content, language, and style
Conducting short research projects to answer questions
Organizing informative/explanatory writing by definition, classification, cause and effect, comparison and contrast
Writing Goals/Objectives
Grammar Goals/Objectives
Being able to communicate effectively in writing requires a mastery of grammar and mechanics. Practically, that translates into doing better in school, getting the jobs we seek, and clarifying our points of view. In seventh grade, grammar instruction focuses on concepts such as:
Using prepositional phrases and clauses correctly
Understanding and use of all parts of speech, including plural nouns, possessive nouns, verb tenses, adjectives, adverbs, prepositional phrases, and conjunctions
Applying the rules of convention for capitalization and punctuation
Recognition of simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences to signal differing relationships among ideas.
In 7th grade language arts, students should be increasing their ability to analyze and synthesize information, strengthening their reading skills , and improving their writing proficiency.
On this page you will discover the key English language arts (ELA) concepts your 7th grader will need to know, learn more about the general 7th grade language arts objectives, and find out how Time4Learning’s seventh grade language arts curriculum helps homeschool families achieve their goals for this important year of education.