GRADE SEVEN

In Grade Seven, students are charged with emotional vitality, questioning authority and needing greater accuracy and articulation. The heroic figures of the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery challenge grade sevens to take responsibility for their actions. The lives of explorers, artists, and great thinkers provide a mirror for the budding adolescent in his/her newly developing identity. The adolescent’s emotional life is explored in a thoughtful, organized way through poetry, geometry, and perspective drawing. Cognitive skills are challenged by the increasing expectation of clarity and order in verbal and written expression as well as through the observation of phenomena in the sciences, the humanities, and the arts.

The students are increasingly experiencing themselves as individuals with tastes and impulses of their own. They rightfully challenge accepted practices and ideas in order to understand and participate in a more independent way. The goal is for the student to experience a stronger sense of self-mastery and responsibility.

Language Arts

• Writing
• Reading
• Spelling
• Grammar
• Research Skills
• Composition/Creative Writing
• Speech Formation/Dramatics
• Literature

The students are introduced formally to metres and poetic structures. These are used as a foundation to explore specific experiences of wish, wonder, surprise, fear, anger, and other soul moods. The natural mood swings of adolescence are worked with using these poetic structures allowing students to shape their inner experiences and to articulate them in a new way.

Mathematics

• Geometry
• Algebra
• Square Roots

The experience of algebra brings simple, logical structures into more complex problem solving. The students continue to work with plane geometry, often focused on the geometry of triangles and the laws of construction in regard to the various kinds of geometrical centres. Constructions become increasingly demanding both technically and cognitively. Accuracy is essential in both thinking and technique. This practice gives the children confidence in their growing capacities.

Sciences

• Inorganic Chemistry
• Physics
• Human Physiology

The wonder and excitement that the students showed in grade six science is now matched with an intense curiosity and a quest into knowing more about what they are studying. The demonstrations, activities, and investigations help to refine the students’ capacities for observation and develop their skills for drawing conclusions and forming judgments.

Grade seven is the first introduction to a more formal study of chemistry. Combustion is the starting point for this study, followed by a consideration of the lime cycle, salts, acids, and bases. This relates closely to the physiology block and the work on the digestive system, which will be picked up again in the grade eight chemistry block. Students are able to observe familiar occurrences in the areas of sound, light, and heat in the study of physics. The students are guided through careful observation from which they can then form judgments. The sciences allow students to experience and explore the phenomenon of the world around them.

Social Sciences

• Renaissance
• Voyages of Discovery

The history of the Renaissance and the Age of Exploration meets the student’s inner experience with biographies of human beings who fought with the cultural life of their times in order to live out of their own individual conscience rather than the laws of the State or Church.

Second Languages

• French
• German

Fine Arts

• Perspective drawing
• Pencil drawing
• Woodwork: dovetail and mortise joints, inlay

Through a study of perspective drawing, the students can experience the meeting of science and art. Depth, no longer seen as an arbitrary phenomenon, has mathematical lawfulness. This study connects well with the history curriculum, as the discovery of the mathematical laws of perspective in the Renaissance, first used in art, became the foundation for a new accuracy in map making, a technological support for the explorers, and also provided some of the foundation for the new scientific worldview.

Music

• Band
• Recorder
• Singing

Physical Education

• Cooperative Games
• Sports
• Health
• Eurythmy