The Big Ideas – Grade 7 Teacher and Student Editions are designed as a first point of exploration and learning for students, with engaging and meaningful projects for students that utilize real-world data and experiences. Students are given the opportunity to develop their mathematical abilities through active learning experiences, and thought-provoking projects and tasks, that puts the responsibility on the students to investigate how they will best solve problems. Students follow the DAPIC process where they design, assess, plan, implement and communicate and teachers are encouraged to set out the problems and provide guidance and information only when necessary. Students should show perseverance, confidence and achievement in their learning. Teachers should work to guide students’ ideas and guide them towards solutions and understanding of their own making.
Once the initial careers aligned projects have been delivered, teachers are provided with by standard skills lessons that are teacher led. As occurs in traditional programs, teachers explain the content of each standard, demonstrate methods, and plenty of practice occurs for students.
The final section of the guide incorporates a reader-activity arts project where Amelia Rose and her family complete NGSS science aligned activities and solve a problem using their mathematics knowledge and skills. The reader activity content is also aligned to California ELAR. The content for environmental principles and concepts is within all lesson plans but we provide an end of Big Idea EP&C project which demands demonstration of knowledge and skills of the grade’s SMP’s.
Why Big Ideas? The concept of the Big Ideas is to move away from more traditional standard-by-standard learning and progress toward understanding mathematical concepts in ways that connect across grade levels, building upon prior learning knowledge and experiences.
This approach to teaching, and learning, aims to integrate rather than isolate math concepts, highlighting the real-world uses of mathematics within daily life. We aim to provide students with the opportunity to use their learned skills with fluency, flexibility, efficiency and accuracy.
Students learn best by doing.
