This resource accompanies our Rethink 7th Grade ELA course. It includes ideas for use, ways to support exceptional children, ways to extend learning, digital resources and tools, tips for supporting English Language Learners and students with visual and hearing impairments. There are also ideas for offline learning. 

This parent guide supports parents in helping their child at home with the 7th grade ELA content.

This lesson was designed to help students gain social studies/history content knowledge by using textual evidence to answer text-dependent questions.In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this history through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

In this lesson, students perform a close reading of an informational text to learn about the history of the Blackstone Canal.

This lesson uses several strategies for scaffolding learning after reading a novel. The students work collaboratively to create Facebook profiles, Instagram profiles, plot diagrams and many other activities to evaluate their comprehension and analysis of a novel. This lesson gives students the opportunity to take charge of their learning by giving them choice.

Students become familiar with the similarities and differences between electronic and printed text by comparing the textual aids included in a textbook with those of an educational website.

This lesson aligns with the 7th grade Social Studies curriculum and works best when integrated into an interdisciplinary unit, such as Reliving the Middle Ages Across Lliterary Genres. Interdisciplinary Units are effective when teachers from two different content areas collaborate to plan lessons, assessments, activities and projects that support their content skills and standards. The content being taught in one course supports the content in another and students approach difficult, content-specific texts with more familiarity and gain better comprehension.  Students read two nonfiction articles about the Middle Ages, which lasted from about A.D. 500 to A.D. 1500. Both texts examine one of the most significant events of this time period-- the spread of the bubonic plague, or the Black Death. Each text is organized into cause-and-effect pattern of organization. One outlines HOW the disease spread (causes) and the other explains how it affected Europe (effects). Students analyze two texts by different authors writing about the same topic, the Black Plague, and compare/contrast how each author shapes their presentations of key information by emphasizing different evidence. 

This curriculum guide for The Heart of Everything That Is: Young Readers Edition: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, an American Legend by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin contains discussion questions for each chapter, key vocabulary terms, and extra activities for after reading.

E-book readers, or digital readers, are devices that can host thousands of electronic books and allows readers to interact with digital texts through the use of e-book tools and features. In this lesson, students will read e-books and use digital tools (dictionaries and notes) to support their development of vocabulary. Specifically, students will assume roles of “word detectives” as they look up words in digital dictionaries and use other strategies to identify the meaning of vocabulary words.

Students will explore the Articles of Confederation and the Articles' influence in revising the Constitution of 1787. Students will experience the sentiments of Federalists and Anti Federalists by participating in a partner debate as either North Carolina Federalist James Iredell or Anti Federalist Willie Jones.

Suggestions on how to guide students through the writing process when writing editorials "” from brainstorming a topic to publishing their work "” and all the steps in between.

Students will read scientific text about top predators in Arctic marine ecosystems and how they may be affected by global climate change. Students will work individually or collaboratively to write a report based on the scientific text they have read and participate in a large-group discussion session based on their analysis.

In this lesson, students will begin to work with the central text, César Chávez’s Commonwealth Club Address (1984).

In this lesson, students focus on Paragraphs 16–21 of Chavez's speech and how it contributes to his central claim.

In this final lesson about César Chávez’s Commonwealth Club Address, students notice the tools of rhetoric that Chávez uses to develop his claims in the second part of the speech.

In this lesson, students work with an introductory central text: “Teen Slang: What’s, Like, So Wrong with Like?”

This lesson follows the same structure as Lesson 7, except with a different text and adjustments to the Opening and Closing.