7th Grade ELAR

  • English Language Arts and Reading 7 is a TEKS-based course designed to increase and refine students’ foundational literacy skills in listening, speaking, reading, writing and thinking. The course focuses on the interconnected nature of literacy through daily academic conversations, writing, and reading and includes cross-curricular and college/career literacy. Students build on prior knowledge and skills to read increasingly complex texts, both self-selected and teacher-selected, and build understandings of challenging vocabulary and author’s craft. Students continue to hone composition and research skills through recursive writing practices in multiple genres. Students build communication skills through informal and formal speaking activities. 

7th Grade Honors ELAR

  • Honors English Language Arts and Reading 7 is a course designed for high-achieving 7th-grade students demonstrating advanced English language arts and reading skills. Students will receive instruction leading to subsequent PreAP and AP English Language Arts courses. Honors English Language Arts and Reading 7 is a TEKS-based course designed to increase and refine students’ foundational literacy skills in listening, speaking, reading, writing and thinking. The course focuses on developing advanced habits of the mind required to succeed in post-secondary pursuits. Emphasis is placed on increasing students’ development of critical thinking skills through daily close observation and analysis, evidence-based writing, higher-order questioning, and academic conversations. Summer reading is required. 

Book List

  • Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie

    by Jordan Sonnenblick Year Published:

     

    Thirteen-year-old Steven has a totally normal life; he plays drums in the All-Star Jazz band, has a crush on the prettiest girl in the school, and is constantly annoyed by his five-year-old brother, Jeffrey. But when Jeffrey is diagnosed with leukemia, Steven's world is turned upside down. He is forced to deal with his brother's illness and his parents' attempts to keep the family in one piece. Salted with humor and peppered with devastating realities, Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie is a heartwarming journey through a year in the life of a family in crisis.

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  • A Christmas Carol

    by Charles Dickens Year Published:

    Generations of readers have been enchanted by Dickens’s A Christmas Carol—the most cheerful ghost story ever written, and the unforgettable tale of Ebenezer Scrooge’s moral regeneration. Written in just a few weeks, A Christmas Carol famously recounts the plight of Bob Cratchit, whose family finds joy even in poverty, and the transformation of his miserly boss Scrooge as he is visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future.

    From Scrooge’s “Bah!” and “Humbug!” to Tiny Tim’s “God bless us every one!” A Christmas Carol shines with warmth, decency, kindness, humility, and the value of the holidays. But beneath its sentimental surface, A Christmas Carol offers another of Dickens’s sharply critical portraits of a brutal society, and an inspiring celebration of the possibility of spiritual, psychological, and social change.

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  • The Outsiders

    by S.E. Hinton Year Published:

    The Outsiders is about two weeks in the life of a 14-year-old boy. The novel tells the story of Ponyboy Curtis and his struggles with right and wrong in a society in which he believes that he is an outsider. According to Ponyboy, there are two kinds of people in the world: greasers and socs. A soc (short for "social") has money, can get away with just about anything, and has an attitude longer than a limousine. A greaser, on the other hand, always lives on the outside and needs to watch his back. Ponyboy is a greaser, and he's always been proud of it, even willing to rumble against a gang of socs for the sake of his fellow greasers--until one terrible night when his friend Johnny kills a soc. The murder gets under Ponyboy's skin, causing his bifurcated world to crumble and teaching him that pain feels the same whether a soc or a greaser.

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Yearbook 2023-2024

  • Our campus Yearbook is based on established principles of writing in journalism while incorporating the creative process through photography and theme development. Students learn the basic concepts of journalism by conducting interviews, writing copy, designing layouts and composing photographs to produce the school yearbook. Students create the yearbook with the aid of computer software. The course works as a business with students responsible for the financial planning, photography, writing, organization, and layout deadlines.

    Full Year Course

    Grade Placement: 8

    Prerequisites: Application and two teacher references.

    Current 7th Graders: See Mrs. Adams to apply for the 2024-2025 school year in the spring semester.