Notes & FAQs

There are no development notes for this Target; see below for response types, stimulus materials, vocabulary & calculator use instead.

The team decided to do rational numbers early in the year as they represent a major cluster of 7th grade content. Students also need the ability to perform rational number operations to successfully understand and implement the grade-level work with expressions and equations. Doing this unit early also allows teachers to assess what major clusters students may have struggled with in 6th grade.

There is no need to start instruction after reviewing prior grade levels.  Whatever operations in need of remediation that were not addressed in Unit 1 can be embedded here as students move from doing operations with whole numbers, fractions and decimals to doing operations with integers along with positive and negative fractions & decimals.

While there are many ways to build conceptual understanding like using money including the removing of a bill for a double negative, numberlines and others; one context based on zero pairs that is greatly effective for all four operations is "Hot Rocks & Cold Rocks."

As soon as possible after learning integers conceptually and while working on integers to gain procedural fluency, students should work on activities like “X Marks the Spot” (Fulton & Lombard) and expressions involving order of operations like those found in Designs in the Coordinate Plane (Jacobs) so students can spend time interpreting when to apply which “rule,” the “rule” for integer combination or integer multiplication/division. These activities also act as a formative assessment of fluency as students seek to properly apply what they have learned in a new context.

Please note that powers with a base of ten are covered in fifth grade, powers with any base are covered in sixth grade, and powers are not specifically mentioned in seventh grade under the 2013 state standards; however, conceptual understanding of & procedural fluency with powers are crucial in 8th grade and beyond. Therefore, once student students have done the conceptual and procedural work with integers, the use of powers should be included within their work with order of operations, including the difference between (-1)^2 and -1^2.

When addressing standard 7.EE.3 which is a portion of Target D, instruction should be focused on multi-step problems with rational numbers including percents as students had instruction in 6th grade in finding parts, whole, and percents. Students will explore percentages further in 7th grade, but should not need that specific instruction to successfully access the multi-step problems as defined by 7.EE.3 and Target D.