In 7th grade, your child will grow in skill and understanding as he or she continues the previous grade’s work in proportional relationships, equations, and positive and negative numbers. These topics will remain a major emphasis throughout the middle school years and into high school. A good command of rates and proportional relationships, including percentages, is also an important life skill.

A Sample of What Your Child Will Be Working on in 7th Grade

• Analyzing proportional relationships (e.g., by graphing in the coordinate plane), and distinguishing proportional relationships from other kinds of mathematical relationships (e.g., buying 10 times as many items will cost you 10 times as much, but taking 10 times as many aspirin will not lower your fever 10 times as much)
• Solving percent problems (e.g., tax, tips, and markups and markdowns)
• Adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing positive and negative numbers, and solving related word problems
• Solving word problems that have a combination of whole numbers, fractions, and decimals (e.g., a woman making $25 per hour receives a 10% raise; she will make an additional 1 ⁄10 of her salary an hour, or $2.50, for a new salary of $27.50)
• Solving equations such as 1 ⁄2 (x – 3) = 3 ⁄4 quickly and accurately, and writing equations of this kind to solve word problems (e.g., “I knocked over a carton of milk, and 3 cups were spilled before I set the carton upright again. When I poured out the remaining milk equally into two measuring cups, there was 3 ⁄4 of a cup of milk in each one. How much milk was originally in the carton?”)
• Solving problems involving scale drawings
• Using statistics to draw inferences and make comparisons (e.g., deciding which candidate is likely to win an election based on a survey