Curriculum and instruction guides: Middle school
Secondary grade-level expectations
What a student should know: sixth through eighth grades
You can help your child succeed by understanding what your student is learning at school and supporting those activities at home. Grade-level expectations describe what a student should know and be able to do in all subject areas. Teachers focus curriculum, instruction and assessments on the grade-level expectations.
If you have questions about specific classroom activities or school programs, please contact your child’s teacher(s).
Assessing learning
In the Vancouver Public Schools, students are assessed on their progress toward meeting the Washington State Learning Standards for literacy and math as well as state content standards in social studies, science, the arts and PE/health. Teachers provide clearly articulated and appropriate expectations for their students that are aligned with these standards and that are appropriate for each course. A wide variety of quality assessments are used to reflect student proficiency, including classroom-based assessments throughout each trimester.
Reporting practices
There are many opportunities for schools to communicate about student learning throughout the school year. Conferences are held during the year to allow parents, students and educators to share information and set goals for the remainder of the school year. At the end of each trimester, report cards are sent home which communicate students’ progress in each of their courses as they work toward meeting learning standards.
Resources
Curriculum guides
Elementary school
Grades K-5 curriculum guides
Ознакомление с программой обучения с Киндергартена по 5-й класс
Planes de estudios para los grados K-5
Middle school
Grades 6–8 curriculum guides
Ознакомление с программой обучения в 6 – 8-х классах
Planes de estudios para los grados 6–8
Sixth grade
- Show vast appetite for food and physical activity
- Experience difficulty with decisions
- Talk impulsively before thinking
- Prefer new tasks and experience to reflection or revision of previous work
- Establish and modify rules, develop hypotheses
- Initiate own activity
- Enjoy conversations with adults and peers
Reading
- Read literary text for approximately 45 percent of their school day and read informational text for 55 percent of their day in classes such as science and social studies
- Read to understand what the text says as well as “reading between the lines” to make logical inferences
- Use evidence from the text to support discussions about the text and claims about the text in writing
- Summarize the text without personal opinions or judgments
- Analyze the text to see how individuals, events and ideas are developed and interact within the text
- Compare multiple texts on the same topic and analyze similarities and differences between the texts
- Be aware of choices authors makes around the words, structure and features of the text
- Find the claim an author makes in a text and evidence to support it
- Demonstrate literacy with electronic texts and visual mediums
- Read texts at appropriately challenging levels proficiently and with help as needed for texts at the high end of complexity by the end of the year
Writing
- Write to persuade or argue a point, to explain information and to narrate experiences
- Participate in multiple short research projects as well as more extended research projects to gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, assess the credibility of each source and quote or paraphrase the data while avoiding plagiarism
- Practice revising and editing writing and use technology to produce and publish writing
- Use appropriate academic vocabulary in writing and demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English grammar and usage when writing or speaking
Mathematical practices
- Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them
- Reason abstractly and quantitatively
- Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others
- Model with mathematics
- Use appropriate tools strategically
- Attend to precision
- Look for and make use of structure
- Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning
Ratios and proportional relationships
- Understand ratio concepts and use ratio reasoning to solve problems
Number system
- Apply and extend previous understandings of multiplication and division to divide fractions by fractions
- Compute fluently with multi-digit numbers and find common factors and multiples
- Apply and extend previous understandings of numbers to the system of rational numbers
Expressions and equations
- Apply and extend previous understandings of arithmetic to algebraic expressions
- Reason about and solve one-variable equations and inequalities
- Represent and analyze quantitative relationships between dependent and independent variables
Geometry
- Solve real-world and mathematical problems involving area, surface area and volume
Statistics and probability
- Develop understanding of statistical variability
- Summarize and describe distributions
- Study the geography, history, civics and economics of the ancient world from pre-history to 600 A.D.
- Compare and contrast elements of culture: society, government, economy, technology, arts, ideas and benefits in river civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Africa; and in Greece, Rome and China
- Understands and applies earth science concepts, content and principles
- Applies scientific skills and procedures
- Participates in inquiry and scientific design
- Identify positive and negative consequences of behavior choices
- Understand the physical maturation process
- Understand the relationship between nutrition and health
- Identify community health resources
- Participate in a variety of individual and team fitness activities
- Understand the components of physical fitness
- Create and monitor a personal fitness plan to meet appropriate fitness standards
In visual arts, music and dance, students acquire knowledge and skills to create, perform and respond in the arts.
By the end of middle school, visual art students will:
- Use and apply visual art elements: line, value, color, shape/form and texture
- Identify and use the principles of organization: composition, rhythm/repetition and balance
- Apply creative process and presentation skills
- Demonstrate knowledge of art history
- Explain how art communicates ideas and emotions
By the end of middle school, choral and/or instrumental music students will:
- Read and write musical notation using whole through sixteenth notes and rests in treble and bass clef
- Recognize, explain and apply musical form
- Understand and apply use of staccato/legato and accent
- Perform with expression individually or in ensemble
- Use listening skills to correct personal tone, pitch, rhythm and volume
- Apply proper audience and performance skills
Seventh and eighth grades
- Enjoy high physical energy
- Set realistic goals in the short term
- Have feelings that are easily hurt
- Display humor highlighted by growth of sarcasm
- Show high interest in current events, politics, social justice, pop culture and materialism
- Learn well in cooperative groups
- Respond well to academic variety and challenge
Reading—by the end of eighth grade
- Build on the reading skills developed in sixth grade and evolve to a level of critical reading to prepare for high school
- Read literary texts during 45 percent of their reading day and informational texts for 55 percent of their reading day
- Critical reading, including skills such as analyzing how an author develops a main idea in a text and makes connections between individuals, ideas or events
- Analyze how words set a tone in a piece of writing and how the structure of paragraphs and sentences play a role in refining a concept
- Determine an author’s point of view and analyze how the author acknowledges and responds to conflicting evidence or viewpoints
- Determine the author’s claim, find evidence to support the claim and decide whether the author’s reasoning is sound and the evidence is relevant and sufficient
- Read independently texts at the top range of grade-band complexity
Writing—by the end of eighth grade
- Respond to text-based questions in short as well as more extended responses
- Develop research skills with short and more extended research projects
- Engage in a cycle that includes reading, discussing what has been read with others and writing about what they have read and discussed
- Through content studies, integrate these literacy skills in ways that will prepare for high school work
Mathematical practices
- Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them
- Reason abstractly and quantitatively
- Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others
- Model with mathematics
- Use appropriate tools strategically
- Attend to precision
- Look for and make use of structure
- Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning
Seventh-grade critical areas
- Developing understanding of and applying proportional relationships
- Developing understanding of operations with rational numbers and working with expressions and linear equations
- Solving problems involving scale drawings and informal geometric constructions, and working with two- and three-dimensional shapes to solve problems involving area, surface area and volume
- Drawing inferences about populations based on samples
Eighth-grade critical areas
- Formulating and reasoning about expressions and equations, including modeling an association in bivariate data with a linear equation and solving linear equations and systems of linear equations
- Grasping the concept of a function and using functions to describe quantitative relationships
- Analyzing two- and three-dimensional space and figures using distance, angle, similarity and congruence and understanding and applying the Pythagorean Theorem
Seventh-gradecontent
- Washington state history/world affairs
Eighth-grade content
- United States from development to 1900
- Understand and apply life science and physical science concepts, content and principles
- Apply scientific skills and procedures
- Participate in inquiry and scientific design
- Identify positive and negative consequences of behavior choices
- Understand the physical maturation process
- Understand the relationship between nutrition and health
- Identify community health resources
- Participate in a variety of individual and team fitness activities
- Understand the components of physical fitness
- Create and monitor a personal fitness plan to meet appropriate fitness standards
In visual arts, music and dance, students acquire knowledge and skills to create, perform and respond in the arts.
By the end of middle school, visual art students will:
- Use and apply visual art elements: line, value, color,shape/form and texture
- Identify and use the principles of organization: composition, rhythm/repetition and balance
- Apply creative process and presentation skills
- Demonstrate knowledge of art history
- Explain how art communicates ideas and emotions
By the end of middle school, choral and/or instrumental music students will:
- Read and write musical notation using whole through one-sixteenth notes and rests in treble and bass clef
- Recognize, explain and apply musical form
- Understand and apply use of staccato/legato and accent
- Perform with expression individually or in ensemble
- Use listening skills to correct personal tone, pitch, rhythm and volume
- Apply proper audience and performance skills