GRADE 7 - Skills

Students should enter seventh grade being able to:

• Use parts of speech correctly (grades K-6)

• Use correct subject/verb and pronoun/antecedent agreement (grades 1, 3, and 6)

• Use commas correctly (grades 1-6)

• Use other punctuation correctly (grades 1-5)

• Spell correctly (grades 2-6)

• Recognize variations from standard English in their own and others’ writing and speaking, and identify and use strategies to improve expression in conventional language (grade 6)

• Vary sentence patterns for meaning, reader/listener interest, and style (grades 5-6)

• Maintain consistent style and tone (grade 6)

Students should build on this foundation throughout seventh grade.

1. Reinforce the skills students gained in earlier grades. When conducting shared writing or displaying models of student writing,

locate examples and discuss with students how those examples are formed correctly.

2. Expand student skills. Explicitly teach students how to:

a. Choose sentence types to signal differing relationships among ideas

b. Place phrases and clauses in a sentence, recognizing and correcting misplaced or dangling modifiers

c. Use a comma to separate coordinate adjectives

d. Choose language that expresses ideas precisely, recognizing and eliminating wordiness and redundancy