Math 7 Course Description

To start the year, students will extend their knowledge by learning how to measure, draw, and classify angles.  They will investigate relationships between angles formed by intersecting lines as well as the measures (and sum of the measures) of the interior angles of any polygon.  Students will also learn how to measure perimeter and area of polygons.  They will be introduced to pi (Π) in the context of finding circumferences of circles and learn to use formulas to help them find these measurements.  Students study squaring and taking the square root of a number which will enable them to find side lengths of right triangles, work with the Pythagorean Theorem, and apply the Pythagorean Theorem to real-world situations.

Students will look at true and false equations.  They learn that if an equation contains a variable, the values of the variable that make the equation true are called solutions of the equation.  Next, students learn about two methods for solving equations.  The backtracking methods, which can be used to find solutions for many equations in which the variable occurs only once.  The second method, called the guess-check-and-improve method, allows students to find exact or approximate solutions for an even broader group of equations. 

Students will then be working with data and probability.  They will conduct simple experiments to determine experimental probabilities, calculate theoretical probabilities in simple situations with a small number of equally likely outcomes, calculate measures of central tendency, as well as interpret bar graphs, line graphs, circle graphs, line plots, and stem-and-leaf plots. 

Students then move into understanding expressions.  They will manipulate expressions and investigate writing algebraic expressions and formulas that relate to specific situations.  Then students will be introduced to the distributive property, as they become familiar with concrete models, they are introduced to symbolic representations using flowcharts and tables.

Now students move into working with geometry in three dimensions.  They will use blocks to build patterns and use algebraic expressions to describe their patterns.  They will describe the number of blocks in each stage of their patterns as well as the number of blocks added to go from one stage to the next.  Students will explore the relationship between surface area and volume.