What does a student learn in StateMississippi,GradeGrade 7,SubjectScience?

Students examine how living things depend on each other and their environment to survive. They look at food webs, predator-prey relationships, and what happens when one part of an ecosystem changes.

Matter doesn't disappear when a plant or animal dies. Carbon, water, and other materials cycle through soil, air, water, and living things so ecosystems can keep sustaining new life.

Students read diagrams showing how water, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen move through living systems and explain why that cycling keeps organisms alive.

Photosynthesis and cellular respiration are two linked processes that keep living things running. Students read data to explain how plants capture sunlight to make food, and how plants and animals break that food down to release usable energy.

Students trace what happens when the body breaks down food. Carbohydrates, fats, and proteins react with oxygen inside cells to release energy and form new molecules the body can use.

Students trace what happens when a natural cycle gets interrupted. A broken water or carbon cycle can shrink the variety of living things in an ecosystem and reduce the clean water, food, and medicines that humans depend on.

Students design plans to keep ecosystems healthy, thinking through how clean water stays clean, soil stays in place, and local species survive without being crowded out by invasive ones.

Students learn how matter is organized and how substances interact and change at the chemical level. Think of it as explaining why wood burns, why iron rusts, and how ingredients combine to make something completely new.

Physical properties describe what you can observe or measure about a substance, like color, hardness, or how well it conducts heat. Chemical properties describe how it reacts or changes when mixed with other substances.

Students observe and record physical traits of a substance, like whether it conducts heat, its color, or whether a magnet attracts it, to identify what the substance is without changing it chemically.

Students look at evidence like whether a material burns or rusts to describe what that material is made of and how it behaves chemically.

Students sort the traits of a material into two groups: ones that describe what it looks, feels, or measures like (physical), and ones that describe what it turns into during a reaction, like burning or rusting (chemical).

Heating or cooling a substance changes how fast its molecules move, which can turn a solid into a liquid or a gas. Students learn how pressure plays the same kind of role, squeezing molecules together or letting them spread out.

When temperature or pressure changes, atoms and molecules speed up, slow down, spread out, or squeeze together. Students predict how those shifts affect new materials like self-healing films or porous concrete.

Students explain how squeezing a gas, heating it, or changing its container affects how spread out the particles become and how much pressure builds up. They back up each relationship with evidence from more than one experiment.

Students learn why a hot air balloon rises and a deep-sea fish looks different under pressure. They ask questions about why matter gets less dense when heated and more dense when compressed.

Reading the periodic table, students figure out an element's properties, like how reactive it is or what group it belongs to, and use that information to predict how it will behave or combine with other elements.

Students build diagrams of an atom showing its protons, neutrons, and electrons. The model shows where each part sits and what charge it carries.

Students read science texts and arrange key discoveries in order to explain how our understanding of what atoms look like has changed over time.

Students gather data from lab investigations to compare how different materials behave physically and chemically, then look for patterns that explain what makes each substance unique.

Students use the periodic table to predict how an element will behave: whether it conducts electricity, reacts easily with other substances, or falls into the metal or non-metal family.

Students learn to read a chemical formula like a recipe shorthand. The letter stands for the element, and the small number beside it tells how many atoms of that element are in one molecule of that substance.

Students use the periodic table to predict which elements will bond together and how. They explain why some elements share electrons to form molecules like water, while others transfer electrons to form compounds like table salt.

Students read chemical formulas to figure out what substances are made of, then predict what will happen when those substances interact. The focus is on recognizing patterns in reactions before they occur.

Students look at data from chemistry experiments and use patterns in the results to predict what will happen in a new reaction.

Students design and run experiments to show that a chemical reaction happened, like metal rusting, food cooking, or a plant turning sunlight into energy. They collect evidence that the original substances changed into something new.

Students test household substances like vinegar and baking soda to find out if they are acids or bases, then record and interpret what happens when an acid and a base are mixed together.

Students build a model showing that chemical reactions either store energy when new bonds form between atoms or release energy when bonds break. This explains why some reactions feel hot and others feel cold.

Matter isn't created or destroyed in a chemical reaction. Students learn that the total mass of the starting materials always equals the total mass of the products, even when substances change form.

Students run a simple experiment to show that mass doesn't change during a chemical reaction. What goes in equals what comes out, a principle Antoine Lavoisier proved more than 200 years ago.

In an open system, burning or reacting materials seem to lose mass because gases escape into the air. Students look at data to explain where that "missing" mass actually went.

Balanced chemical equations show the same number of atoms on both sides of the reaction arrow. Students compare balanced and unbalanced equations to see that atoms are rearranged in a reaction, not created or destroyed.

Students trace how water, rock, and air move through repeating cycles that shape Earth's surface and weather. Each system connects to the others, so a change in one (like a drought) ripples through the rest.

Heat from the sun, wind, land, and ocean temperatures all push air and water around the planet. Those movements shape the daily weather outside your window and the long-term climate patterns across the globe.

Weather is what the sky does today. Climate is what it usually does over many years. Students study weather data from different regions to explain why those two ideas are not the same thing.

Weather forms when water and air masses move and interact. Students study real data to explain why those movements bring conditions like rain, wind, or temperature shifts.

Students read weather data from satellites, radar, and maps to predict what conditions are coming. They practice the same reasoning meteorologists use to forecast rain, wind, and temperature changes.

Climate is the long-term weather pattern of a place. Students explain why one region is hot and dry while another is cold and rainy by examining where it sits on the globe, how high it sits, how close it is to the ocean, and how winds and ocean currents move heat around Earth.

Students study how heat from the sun moves through the air and oceans to create wind, storms, and the long-term weather patterns we call climate. They use models to trace what happens when sunlight warms one part of Earth more than another.

Students research how air masses collide and pressure systems shift to explain why severe storms like thunderstorms, hurricanes, and tornadoes form where and when they do.

Reading a topographic map, students explain how nearby mountains, valleys, and plains shape local weather and why those same features make exact forecasts hard to pin down.

Students explain how events like volcanic eruptions and human activities like burning fuel both affect Earth's climate. The focus is on understanding what drives long-term changes in global temperature and weather patterns.

Students read science articles and other sources about climate change, then judge whether the evidence holds up and whether the source has a bias. The goal is to explain what drives climate change and what effects it produces.

Reading graphs and data tables, students connect how burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and how that buildup of greenhouse gases changes what heat the Earth holds in.

Students look at climate data and scientific evidence to argue whether recent climate change is natural, human-caused, or both. The focus is on building a case from real evidence, not just stating an opinion.

Seasons happen because Earth tilts on an axis, not because Earth moves closer to or farther from the sun. Students learn how that tilt changes the angle and strength of sunlight hitting each hemisphere, making summers warm and winters cold.

Students draw or build a model showing why Earth's tilted axis causes one hemisphere to receive stronger, more direct sunlight at certain times of year. This explains why summers are warmer and winters are cooler.

Students investigate why the Northern and Southern hemispheres experience opposite seasons at the same time. The key idea: Earth's tilt means each hemisphere gets more direct sunlight for part of the year and less for the other part.