<< Back to Curriculum | Syllabus for 7th Grade Math

Hello and welcome to all of our new and returning students and parents, other guests, and any celebrity impersonators!

I'm Travis Schwarzbach and I'll be teaching math to all 6th-graders and some 7th-grade students. We're going to tear up the track this year, so here's a peek at our road map...

Measurement is first on our 'to-do' list. It's our top priority because students often struggle with this concept; the reason for this difficulty is we just don't measure much in our daily lives. I encourage you to invite your child to participate in meal preparation, assisting with dry and liquid measures. Most of us are part-time chauffeurs, providing a convenient opportunity to discuss mileage, which is a great example of linear measurement. Guessing the weight of the neighbor's dog or your new F150 can spark an interesting conversation, as well. The key is getting our kids thinking about measurement in everyday situations.

Next stop, geometry and spatial sense. Our students aren't too apprehensive about this subject because they've been surrounded by shapes all of their lives; however, geometry has its own language, i.e., a lot of related vocabulary, so introducing terms, characteristics, and definitions early in the year gives us ample time for repetition and reinforcement; students are often surprised regarding geometry's underlying complexity. Shapes are everywhere ... architecture; billboards; newspapers and magazines; planes, trains, and automobiles, etc.; identify a shape and ask your child what s/he knows about it.

Number sense, concepts and operations will be our third of five areas of study, the middle 'child'. This is the nuts & bolts of math, computations and problem-solving involving integers, fractions, and decimals. There's no paint and polish here; these are the gears and pistons that make the math engine run. It's mission-critical that students know multiplication math facts; there's no way to sugar-coat this, so I won't ... if your child doesn't know them, s/he is going to struggle until they're committed to memory. Period.

Our clean-up hitter will be algebraic thinking. Welcome to The Show! This is where we take all of the building blocks we've learned and actually construct patterns, relationships, and functions! We'll nourish ourselves with a steady diet of tables, graphs, expressions, equations, and inequalities, strengthening our ability to represent (mathematically) and interpret real-life problems.

As we round the final turn into the home-stretch, we'll be studying data analysis (a.k.a. statistics) and probability. This is my favorite! Entire industries, e.g., insurance, meteorology, gaming, etc. are based on this field. We'll learn that a forty percent chance of rain means it probably isn't going to rain and that the odds are less than one-in-a-thousand that you could flip a coin ten times and get heads (or tails) every time. Go ahead, challenge your child to do this the next time you need a little peace and quiet!

It's tip-off time ... game on!