Grade 7 · Science

Grade 7 science

In grade 7, science stops being mostly about naming things and starts asking why they happen: why a food chain has so few foxes, why salt seems to vanish in water, why a metal spoon in hot tea gets hot. Here is what it covers, where kids usually get stuck, and one way to help.

What your child learns this year

The topics differ more by province and state in science than in math. Most grade 7 classes in Canada cover several of these:

  • Ecosystems. How living things depend on each other, food chains and webs, and how energy passes from one living thing to the next.
  • Mixtures and solutions. Pure substances and mixtures, dissolving, and ways to separate one thing from another.
  • Heat. What temperature measures, how heat moves from warm to cool, and the idea that everything is made of tiny moving particles.
  • Structures and forces. Why some structures stand and others fall, and how shape and bracing make them stronger.
  • Earth's crust. Rocks and minerals, and the slow forces that shape the land.
  • Doing science. Asking a testable question, changing one thing at a time, and drawing a fair conclusion from the results.

British Columbia's grade 7 adds evolution and electricity and magnetism. In the US, Texas and Florida set grade 7 topics of their own, and states that follow the Next Generation Science Standards teach grades 6 to 8 as one band.

Where kids usually get stuck

  1. 1Thinking all the energy passes up a food chain. In fact only about a tenth passes up each step. The rest is used for living and lost as heat, which is why there are far fewer foxes than rabbits.
  2. 2Saying the salt disappeared. Dissolved salt is still there, in pieces too small to see. Let the water evaporate and it is left behind, and the salt water weighs the water plus the salt.
  3. 3Saying the cold moves into your hand. There is no cold that flows. Heat leaves your warm hand and moves into the ice.

One of Pip's tricks

Picture the particles

Use it when explaining what happens in a solid, a liquid or a gas, or why things grow when they warm up.

  1. Picture the substance as tiny particles that are always moving, with spaces between them.
  2. In a solid they are packed close and vibrate in place. In a liquid they stay close but slide past each other. In a gas they are far apart and move in every direction.
  3. Heating makes the particles move faster and spread apart. Cooling slows them and brings them closer (water freezing is the one exception: ice takes more space).
  4. The particles themselves never grow, shrink or melt. Only their speed and spacing change.

Watch it work. A balloon carried from a cold garage into a warm house gets a little bigger. Did the air particles get bigger? No: the air warmed up, so its particles moved faster, hit the balloon harder and spread farther apart. Each particle stayed the same size.

Why it works: temperature measures how fast the particles move on average, so heating speeds them up and they need more room.

Try three

Tap a choice to see if it is right, with the reason.

  1. 1.Grass stores 1000 units of energy. About how much ends up in the rabbits that eat it?

  2. 2.How would you separate salt from sand?

  3. 3.A cold drink left in a warm room “gets warm”. What really happens?

How Sparkpip fits in

Pip works through questions like these with your child one small step at a time, using ways of thinking like the one above.

Start freeSee how it works

Your curriculum

Sparkpip is built on the grade 7 science curriculum for your province or state. The official pages:

Also: Grade 6 science · Grade 8 science · Grade 7 math · Grade 7 English