Fifth Grade

In fifth grade, students begin to refine their executive functioning skills. Students are encouraged to keep a planner, talk with their family about how to best prepare for upcoming projects and tests in various subjects, as well as talk about their feelings and how they can best recalibrate when needed. Student Advisory begins in 5th grade to help students with conflict resolution, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion topics, as well as opportunities to engage in community service. Academic rigor increases and all subjects provide essential questions to guide deeper level thinking and connections across disciplines.

Reading, Phonics, and Vocabulary  

In fifth grade, the literary focus is connecting, inferencing, predicting, and synthesizing. Throughout the year students work on constructing and solidifying deeper inquiry skills in a whole-group setting. Students learn how to support their ideas with direct evidence from the text, and participate in group discussions. Class novels include, Maniac Magee, The City of Ember, and The Witch of Blackbird Pond.

Writing and Grammar 

Students continue to develop proper technique and usage in writing. Writer’s Workshop units include: personal narratives, informational writing (historical/research), literary essays, and a research-based argument essay. All stages of the writing process are implemented, and students continue to strengthen peer revising and editing. In grammar, students learn about types of sentences, parts of speech, sentence structure, and how grammar is a communication tool and the foundation for writing and speech.

Mathematics

The fifth grade program enables students to develop skills by building on previously learned concepts with a spiraling review. Math is taught through direct instruction, guided learning. Classes are differentiated according to ability and pacing levels determined at the beginning of the year. Students learn about how place value is impacted with operations involving multiplication and division, they write expressions and equations, decimals and fraction fluency continues, students are introduced to the coordinate plane, plotting points, and discovering relationships between positive and negative integers. Students explore units of measure, making multi-step conversions, and finish the year with a study of volume and the surface area of figures.

Science

Science is taught through FOSS Science kits, providing hands-on, inquiry-based investigations. Direct instruction and collaborative group work encourage students to make predictions, brainstorm possibilities, use knowledge of science to prove or disprove ideas, and draw conclusions. Units include: mixtures and solutions (with an emphasis on chemical reactions and physical properties), living systems and transport, a study of the Earth and sun, the Earth as a water planet, and the atmosphere’s role in heating the Earth. Students develop science knowledge by building a framework of concepts and supporting ideas. Each experiment has a focus question to guide students’ learning followed by a lab write-up. Science notebooks are rich with evidence of the vast array of knowledge, questioning, data gathering and conclusions made by students.

Social Studies

Fifth grade focuses on geography skills and the history of the United States. Students study the exploration of North America by Europeans, early English settlements and the thirteen colonies, slavery in America, the tension between the colonists and Great Britain, the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, and finish the year with a study of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The social studies curriculum in fifth grade culminates in a Liberty Day celebration on campus, simulating aspects of colonial living and presenting research on key events and personalities.  Students learn how to bring history to life!