English Language Arts

About this course

Seventh grade assumes the basics are done and works on precision. Grammar spends its first pass on phrases, clauses, all four sentence types, comma splices, and the full punctuation rules, then in the second pass goes somewhere most middle-school programs do not: verbals. Your student learns participles used as adjectives, gerunds used as nouns, and infinitives, then parallel structure, appositives and absolute phrases, agreement in inverted sentences, and the possessive before a gerund. There are also lessons on commonly confused pairs (affect and effect, its and it's), disputed usage (less and fewer, who and whom, lay and lie), and matching register to audience. Writing is built around the thesis statement and the body paragraph, taught with two named frameworks, PIE (point, illustration, explanation) and CEI (claim, evidence, interpretation), with particular attention to the step students usually skip, explaining why the evidence proves the claim. From there it covers compare-contrast and cause-effect essays, integrating quotations, counterargument and rebuttal, global versus local revision, peer editing with a checklist, and assembling a portfolio.

Word study and vocabulary are unusually deep for this grade. Beyond Greek and Latin roots, your student works through etymology and semantic change, words borrowed from mythology and other languages, neologisms, legal and governmental vocabulary, paradox and oxymoron, understatement and euphemism, the archaic vocabulary of the King James Bible, and a lesson on the technical language of rhetoric itself, including anaphora and chiasmus, illustrated with the Beatitudes, Mark 2:27, Churchill, and Kennedy. Reading comprehension covers argument analysis, evaluating evidence quality, logical fallacies, reading for tone, assessing the reliability of historical primary sources, and synthesizing across genres on one topic. The literature strand covers plot, character, conflict, sound devices, foreshadowing, symbolism, irony, poetry, drama, the Psalms as poetry and prayer, and one lesson surveying Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia as literature.

The course is 180 lessons across 15 units, twelve lessons per unit, one per school day, at about 50 minutes each. It is arranged as two passes over the same strands: units 1 through 8 cover word study, vocabulary, comprehension, grammar, writing, literature, research, and communication, and units 9 through 15 return to the same strands with harder material rather than repeating it. A typical lesson is 300 to 450 words of direct explanation with headed sections, labeled example sentences, and correct-versus-incorrect pairs, using KJV verses as the working examples. Every lesson ends with a ten-question quiz that grades itself. The research strand runs twice and covers library research and the Dewey Decimal system, responsible internet research, note-taking, citation formats, signal phrases and attribution, smooth source integration, and presenting aloud. Coming in, your student should be writing organized multi-paragraph essays and reading full-length books; the lessons are written for independent work, though the essays and the research project need your eyes on them.

What the course covers

• Greek and Latin roots, etymology, neologisms, and semantic change
• Paradox, oxymoron, allusion, understatement, and euphemism
• Rhetorical terms including ethos, pathos, logos, anaphora, and chiasmus
• Argument analysis, evidence quality, logical fallacies, and bias
• Phrases, clauses, sentence types, and full punctuation rules
• Verbals, parallel structure, appositives, and disputed usage
• Thesis statements and body paragraphs using PIE and CEI
• Counterargument, rebuttal, revision, and peer editing
• Literary devices, poetry, drama, and classic Christian literature
• Library and internet research, citation, and oral presentation

What your student will be able to do

• Identify participles, gerunds, and infinitives and use them correctly
• Write a specific, arguable thesis and support it paragraph by paragraph
• Integrate a quotation with a signal phrase and explain its significance
• Recognize rhetorical devices in a speech or sermon and name their effect
• Judge whether a source is reliable and whether its evidence is strong
• Revise a draft at both the global and the sentence level

Scope and sequence

All 15 units of English Language Arts for Grade 7, in the order they are taught.

Every lesson, by title

All 180 lesson titles are listed here — nothing is withheld until you download. Open a unit to read its contents.

One whole lesson, exactly as it comes

This is a real lesson taken from the middle of the course — the teaching text, the practice, the homework, and the first three quiz questions with their answers. It is not a marketing excerpt.

What you will need

Drawn from the materials named across all 180 lessons of this course. Most families already own most of it.