7th Grade Team

  

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AREA OF KNOWLEDGE (AOK) COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

Leadership and Community

Team Building is a crucial aspect in becoming an adult and is a critical part in being successful in the future. The ability to work as a group is a substantial piece in being successful within the intellectual, social and emotional aspects of learning. This course will help students work as groups effectively, and at the same time students will get to know a lot about each other. Through guided discovery, students will learn the strategies necessary to work effectively within a group to reach a common goal.

Students will:

• Learn strategies on how to work with a group ( compromise, discussion, debate, eye contact, respectful, and how to be a good listener).
• Learn the awesome characteristics and traits of peers
• Finding the kind of role you play in a group (leader/facilitator, energizer, recorder etc.)
• Learn the dysfunctional roles of a team (blocker, aggressor, recognition seeker, dominator, distractor, silent member etc.) 
• Through guided discovery go through the stages of Team Building (Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, Dissolving)
• Learn to trust peers through trust activities ( trust falls, willow in the wind, minefield, human knot, trust pinball etc.)
• Recognize the value of team building skills and applying them to real life situations

Exploring Equity

This course aims to center discussions about race and racism. Digital texts, picture books, articles, essays and other types of texts will be used to spark conversations that help students recognize individual, interpersonal, and institutional racism.  Essential to these courageous conversations is the racial literacy skills students will acquire that help them to recognize, name, and challenge various forms of everyday racism.

Common Core Connections: In compliance with Common Core Literacy Standards, this course provides students with frequent opportunities to analyze texts from diverse cultures and time periods, and contribute accurate, relevant information during discussions about race and racism. As a result, students will build a foundation of knowledge and utilize the vocabulary and tools demonstrated in the AOK class to speak about issues of race and racism  in developmentally appropriate ways. 

Students will:

• Understand that racism exists in many different arenas and capacities
• Understand that biases are often not obvious or immediately present on the surface
• Learn key racial literacy vocabulary such as: race; ethnicity; racism; racial justice; antiracism; allies; assumptions; colorblindness; discrimination; equity;  identity; individual, interpersonal, and institutional racism; marginalized; microaggressions; narrative; counternarrative; oppression; prejudice; privilege; supremacy; systems; social, economic, and political conditions; stereotype
• Learn conversational strategies to discuss racism
• Learn tools to challenge topics
• Learn strategies to deconstruct canned, racial narratives and acquire counternarratives that provide perspectives that have been silenced

Creative Writing

Students in Creative Writing will write works not limited to poems, short stories, plays, news stories, comic strips, children's books, an autobiography and other types of writing that express creativity. Students will learn to have fun with their writing- to take chances and be CREATIVE. Students will be provided with examples from which to model their writing (i.e. Chris Van Allburg's The Chronicles of Harris Burdick) and work will be both independent and collaborative. We will use different prompts to use as springboards for creative pieces: photos, songs, paintings, poems, and many other sources. We will discuss ways to spark creativity and to prevent writer's block. 

Facing History and Ourselves

This course aims to highlight the historical trends and decisions made by individuals, groups and societies that resulted in the extermination of 6 million Jews and other minority groups in Nazi Germany.  

Organizational Skills 

This course is designed to improve the ways in which students organize their priorities, time and materials both at school and at home. Students will receive support in this class by learning strategies that focus on the following: 

• Keeping school supplies, lockers and backpacks organized.
• Setting weekly, monthly and quarterly goals. 
• Working on methods to improve time management skills.
• Learning how to prioritize assignments.
• Developing a schedule to keep track of assignments and long term projects.