7th Grade Minimalist Math Curriculum

It has been FOUR YEARS since I posted the 6th grade curriculum! I have actually been meaning to add this to my blog for quite some time, but 4 years ago I decided to get a teaching credential and 3 years ago, I started working full time as a teacher, and 3 months ago I cleared my credential, and well, I’m just now catching up on life. I’m persistent if nothing else. I’m assuming that most of you who are finding this post are already familiar with my elementary curriculum, but if not, hi! I’m Michelle. I didn’t want my kids to hate math and so I put together simple 10-question-a-week worksheets to make sure my kids saw all the math questions they needed to in a given school year without all the repetition. So far, I can say that this method has worked unreasonably well with my four children. I make no promises, but if you want to try it, you can get my 7th grade questions down below!

If you are curious, this methodology page explains the exact process I used to create these worksheets. Basically, what I end up with are 36 worksheets each with 10 problems from 10 distinct categories. Each week kids are presented with one problem from each category that keep getting progressively more difficult as the year goes on.

The 10 categories that my 7th-grade minimalist math curriculum covers are:

Understanding Numbers
Word Problems
Graphs, Charts, and Tables
Fractions
Length, Area, and Volume
Angles
Ratios and Percents
Statistics and Probability
Algebra
Calculations

The free printable 7th grade worksheets below do not include answers. The version of these worksheets that includes the answer key is available on Etsy. Especially for this 7th grade level, the answer key is morelike a solution guide for most problems. This is the first time that I didn’t even bother trying to type the answers, because it would have taken me like a year. An even better option than buying the full curriculum plus answer key on Etsy is to subscribe to my Patreon membership for $5 per month. Your on-going support helps me to create free resources in the long term. Patreon helps you because included in membership is access to my Minimalist Math Library (among other Patreon gifts), which has answer keys for ALL the grade levels and task cards with all 360 problems that are exclusive to Patreon. If money is an issue, you can download everything you need in the first month and unsubscribe. I won’t judge.

I’m kind of assuming that if you’re interested in these sheets, then you have probably used my curriculum for the younger grades and you know how this works, but just in case, the main idea behind my worksheets is that I have scoured various 7th grade curriculum to pull all the different types of problems that a kid would see in a year. I’ve organized these into 10 different problems per week from a wide range of areas of math. Since kids are not drowning in repetition, they can actually really think about these problems.

I always ask my kids to try all problems on their own first. I want to see if they have any ideas about where to start. Sometimes, they need definitions, like “per-cent” is really “per 100”. Honestly, I just tell my kids definitions and hope that over time they will start remembering those on their own, but you could also ask them to look it up. I don’t give my kids a lesson and then a bunch of a problems. I let them really interrogate these ten problems and then help guide them towards the solutions.

If families ask me if there are any resources I recommend to go along with this 7th grade curriculum, I always say Everything You Need to Ace Pre-Algebra and Algebra 1 in One Big Fat Notebook. I really love this series of books. I don’t actually use the math ones that much with my own kids as I’m good at math and feel like my guidance and making them think through the hard parts is a more valuable and efficient way to learn, but if I were going to hand them a book, this would be it. If there is something I forget, we will look through these books together.

This seventh grade curriculum really is equivalent to a pre-algebra curriculum. Many of the problems were taken from Saxon 8/7 which is meant to be followed by Algebra 1. My 2 older kid have moved successfully from this curriculum to a traditional Algebra 1 curriculum without difficulty. My third child is starting Algebra 1 this year after having used this curriculum last year. We are only on Chapter 2 (using Mr. D), but so far things are going smoothly!

Recommended Age Range: Seventh Grade
Time Required: about 30 minutes per week
Difficulty: starts off fairly easy and gets harder as the weeks progress
Cost: Free printable

Materials
paper

Instructions
Print out the curriculum and help your child complete one worksheet each week for each of the 36 weeks of school.

Free Printable
Minimalist Math – Seventh Grade Curriculum