The Cathedral Grammar School .::. Year 7 Standard

By the end of Year 7, students will read, respond to, and think critically about texts in order to meet the reading demands of The New Zealand Curriculum as they work towards Level 4. Students will locate, evaluate, and synthesise information and ideas within and across a range of texts appropriate to this level as they generate and answer questions to meet specific learning purposes across the curriculum.

The text and task demands of the curriculum are similar for students in Year 7 and Year 8. The difference in the standard for Year 8 is the students' increased accuracy and speed in reading a variety of texts from across the curriculum, their level of control and independence in selecting strategies for using texts to support their learning, and the range of texts they engage with.

In particular, by the end of Year 8, students need to be confidently and deliberately choosing the most appropriate strategies for reading in different learning areas.

The texts that students use to meet the reading demands of the curriculum at this level will often include:

elements that require interpretation, such as complex plots, sophisticated themes, and abstract ideas
complex layers of meaning, and/or information that is irrelevant to the identified purpose for reading (that is, competing information), requiring students to infer meanings or make judgments
non-continuous text structures and mixed text types
sentences that vary in length, including long, complex sentences that contain a lot of information
adverbial clauses or connectives that require students to make links across the whole text
academic and content-specific vocabulary
words and phrases with multiple meanings that require students to know and use effective word-solving strategies to retain their focus on meaning
metaphor, analogy, and connotative language that is open to interpretation
illustrations, photographs, text boxes, diagrams, maps, charts, and graphs, containing main ideas that relate to the text's content.

Such texts will include both fiction and non-fiction in electronic and print media. They may be published individually (for example, as novels, reference materials, textbooks, or modified scientific and historical texts) or in collections (for example, age-appropriate newspapers, magazines, and journals, including the School Journal). Poetry, plays, procedural texts, and extended instructions (for example, in science and mathematics) often appear in collections or textbooks.

The writing standard

By the end of Year 7, students will create texts in order to meet the writing demands of The New Zealand Curriculum as they work towards Level 4. Students will use their writing to think about, record, and communicate experiences, ideas, and information to meet specific learning purposes across the curriculum.

The text and task demands of the curriculum are similar for students in Year 7 and Year 8. The difference in the standard for Year 8 is the students' increased accuracy and fluency in writing a variety of texts across the curriculum, their level of control and independence in selecting writing processes and strategies, and the range of texts they write. In particular, by the end of Year 8, students need to be confidently and deliberately choosing the most appropriate processes and strategies for writing in different learning areas.

Key characteristics of students' writing at this level:

Students will write for a range of different purposes on topics and themes across the curriculum at this level, selecting and applying a process appropriate to the task and drawing on the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that will help them achieve their purpose. The knowledge, skills, and attitudes expected at this level, including those needed for spelling and punctuation, are described in the Literacy Learning Progressions.

Students will independently write texts, choosing language and a clear and logical text structure to meet the requirements of the curriculum task (for example, when writing personal narratives, poems, arguments, feature articles, character profiles, research reports, essays, responses to literature, and short answers). These texts will include, when appropriate:

content that is concise and relevant to the curriculum task and that often includes detail and/or comment supporting or elaborating on the main points
paragraphs within which the ideas are clearly related and links within and between paragraphs
grammatically correct sentences
words and phrases that are appropriate to the topic, register, and purpose, including expressive, academic, and subject-specific vocabulary.

The mathematics standard

By the end of Year 7, students will be achieving at early Level 4 in the mathematics and statistics learning area of The New Zealand Curriculum .

In contexts that require them to solve problems or model situations, students will be able to:

Number and algebra

apply additive and simple multiplicative strategies flexibly to whole numbers, ratios, and equivalent fractions (including percentages)
apply additive strategies to decimals
balance positive and negative amounts
find and represent relationships in spatial and number patterns, using:

tables and graphs
general rules for linear relationships.

Geometry and measurement

measure time and the attributes of objects, using metric and other standard measures
make simple conversions between units, using whole numbers
use side or edge lengths to find the perimeters and areas of rectangles and parallelograms and the volumes of cuboids, given whole-number dimensions
sort two- and three-dimensional shapes into classes, defining properties and justifying the decisions made
identify and describe the transformations that have produced given shapes or patterns
create or identify nets for rectangular prisms and other simple solids
draw plan, front, side, and perspective views of objects
describe locations and give directions, using grid references, simple scales, turns, and points of the compass.

Statistics

investigate summary, comparison, and relationship questions by using the statistical enquiry cycle:

gather or access multivariate category and measurement data
sort data and display it in multiple ways, identifying patterns and variations
interpret results in context, accepting that samples vary and have no effect on one another

order the likelihoods of outcomes for situations involving chance, checking for consistency between experimental results and models of all possible outcomes.