These are the areas that your fifth grader will be focusing on this year.

 

We will be doing a variety of short story readings and skills from our district mandated reading series. As an intervention, we will also be covering the following books and doing activities and projects to enhance this literature: "Night of the Twisters", "The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963", "Sing Down the Moon", and "Woods Runner". I ask that your students NOT read these books on their own prior to reading them during class. The students will respond to the literature, relate it to their own experiences, and learn more about descriptive language and developing a plot. Grades are based on comprehension of reading materials as shown by tests.

 

Our class will write daily, and will be learning to utilize descriptive writing in a variety of written works. Some of the writings we will do are journal writing, narratives, summaries, response to literature, stories, expository paragraphs, tall tales, letters, and poetry. In reading and writing, students will learn and use specific language arts skills. The writing grade is based on the writing rubric.

 

This year, we will be learning how to change decimals and fractions to percents, use exponents, prime factorization, negative numbers, multiply, divide, and reduce mixed numbers, use algebra and coordinate graphing, find the area of a triangle and parallelogram, work with volume and angles, find the mean, and read graphs. We will be using the district mandated Everyday Math program. Math grades are figured by compiling the results of the math tests taken throughout the trimester.

 

Fifth grade social studies is all about the history of the United States! We will learn about Explorers, the Colonial period, the Indian wars, the Revolution, the Constitution, and Westward Movement. Additionally, students will learn the 50 states and capitals. Social studies grades are based on test results.

 

This year in science, we will be studying the water cycle, severe weather, the solar system, cells--both plant and human, and systems of the human body. We will also be learning about the periodic table and chemical reactions. Science grades are based on test results.