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

Students compare substances before and after mixing to figure out if a chemical reaction happened. Signs like a color change, new smell, or gas bubbles tell them whether they ended up with something chemically different.

Students build a diagram or model showing what happens to water (or another pure substance) when it heats up or cools down: particles move faster or slower, temperature rises or falls, and the substance shifts between solid, liquid, and gas.

In a chemical reaction, no atoms are created or destroyed. Students build or interpret a model showing that the atoms just rearrange, which is why the total mass before and after the reaction stays the same.

Students plan an experiment to find out how heating different materials raises their temperature. They test how the type of material and the amount of it affect how much heat energy it takes to change the temperature.

Students draw or diagram how water moves from oceans and lakes into clouds, falls as rain or snow, and flows back downhill. The whole cycle runs on sunlight and gravity.

Students track how air masses move and collide to explain why weather changes. They gather real data, such as temperature and pressure readings, to connect what's happening in the atmosphere to the storms, fronts, and clear skies we see outside.

Students build a diagram or model showing how the sun heats the equator more than the poles, and how Earth's spin bends that heat into the wind and ocean current patterns that give each region its climate.

Students look at temperature records, carbon data, and other evidence to figure out what has driven global warming over the last hundred years. The focus is on asking good questions, not just accepting simple answers.

Students build a written argument explaining how the body's major systems (like the digestive or nervous system) work together, and how each system is made of specialized cells doing a specific job.

Plants absorb sunlight and carbon dioxide to make food through photosynthesis. Students explain how that stored energy gets released through cellular respiration, and how the same matter cycles back and forth between organisms and their environment.

Food doesn't just get used up inside the body. Students learn how digestion breaks food into smaller pieces that cells rearrange into new molecules to build tissue or release energy.

Students plan and build a solution that helps protect a real ecosystem, like a wetland or forest, so it stays healthy enough to keep providing things people depend on, such as clean water or food.

When a river dries up or a new predator arrives, ecosystems shift. Students use real data to argue how those changes cause animal or plant populations to grow, shrink, or disappear.

Students use diagrams or models to explain why a single parent passing on an exact copy of its DNA produces offspring identical to itself, while two parents mixing their DNA produces offspring that look a little different from either one.

Some animals are born with traits that help them survive better than others. Students study how those small differences spread through a population over time when they help creatures find food, avoid danger, or reproduce.

Students research how technologies like selective breeding and genetic modification let humans change which traits get passed down in plants and animals.