This unit operates under the premise that fifth graders are ready for a reading growth spurt and are capable of taking their reading work further than ever before. It delves into the hard work of reading from the beginning, setting the tone for the rigorous work students are expected to do throughout the year. It includes writing about reading in a non-formulaic way with the idea that thoughts are crystallized and clarified and comprehension is deepened when ideas are written down. Students will learn how to support their ideas with evidence, which is based upon the content of the text as well as on the author’s craft. In the books clubs, students learn to discuss their unique interpretations of texts and practice respectfully debating ideas about theme, later comparing and contrasting how similar themes are conveyed in multiple texts, paying particular attention to the role of author’s choice and craft. This is a fiction unit.
Through exploring one text (Amazing Octopus) written at a range of levels of complexity, students learn what it means for a text to be complex, as well as strategies for tackling each challenge. The Text Complexity cards, with a challenge on one side and a strategy on the other, are to be used after the strategies have been taught. These are meant to be a temporary scaffold, to be removed as students internalize these strategies. Once students are adept at monitoring for meaning and using fix-up strategies, they embark on their own independent interest inquiry projects, beginning with primary research to build background knowledge and working up to a variety of sources. They learn to synthesize across subtopics, identify multiple main ideas and finally, consider and question the source, ultimately forming their own perspective to be shared with an authentic audience in a culminating activity.
This unit is intended to be taught alongside the writing unit, The Research-Based Argument Essay. It encourages students to read informational texts in a more critical and analytic way and teaches them to think for themselves, to communicate their viewpoints clearly, and to advocate for change. Students will analyze a variety of arguments, and then work in a research group to study a debatable issue. After building background knowledge on the topic, groups will ask questions and form more nuanced arguments. Towards the end of the unit, students will study a new issue and consider patterns and connections across issues, taking on more ownership of the research process and researching with more independence this time around.
Fantasy Book Clubs: the Magic of Themes and Symbols
This is a high-energy unit where kids read fantasy books in book clubs.
This unit presents students with a clear path to crafting structured literary essays. The unit prepares students to read, reread, and rethink in increasingly sophisticated ways, skills that are important, not only for high-stakes tests, but also for other challenging academic work students will do throughout their lives.
In this unit, students draw inspiration and understanding from mentor texts, historical accounts, primary source documents, maps, and timelines to write focused research reports that engage and teach readers.
This unit teaches fifth graders to build powerful arguments that convincingly balance evidence and analysis to persuade readers to action.
This unit helps students grasp that form follows content. They learn to take insights about their lives and decide whether these are best expressed in narratives, in essays, or in a hybrid genre created especially to convey the writer’s content.
This unit focuses on the operations of multiplication and division. Students refine their strategies for solving multiplication problems with 2-digit numbers, and use the relationship between multiplication and division to develop and practice strategies for solving division problems. They use order of operations to solve computation problems.
This unit focuses on the structure and volume of three-dimensional (3-D) shapes, specifically on rectangular prisms and solids composed of rectangular prisms. Students build models and patterns for boxes that hold quantities of cubes and calculate the volume of these boxes, using a cube as a unit of measure. Because volume is additive, students find the volume of solids by decomposing them into rectangular prisms. They use standard units of measure for volume and apply formulas for volume as they determine the volume of a variety of rectangular solids.
This unit focuses on deepening and extending students’ understanding of fractions and equivalent fractions and representing fractions using an area model (rectangles), a rotation model (a clock), and a linear model (number lines). They use these understandings to add and subtract fractions and mixed numbers.
This unit focuses on the operations of multiplication and division. Students refine their strategies for solving multiplication problems fluently, including using the U.S. standard algorithm. Students continue using the relationship between multiplication and division to efficiently solve division problems with 4-digit dividends and 2-digit divisors.
This unit focuses on using coordinate graphs, ordered pairs, tables, and symbolic notation to model real world and mathematical situations. Students analyze arithmetic patterns in tables and the shapes of graphs to describe and compare these situations. Students work both with situations that follow patterns, allowing predictions of future values (e.g., how the area of a square varies as the length of a side increases) and situations based on data (e.g., temperature over time).
This unit focuses on deepening and extending students’ understanding of decimals and the base-10 number system. Students represent decimals on grids and number lines. They use their understanding of decimals to compare, add, and subtract decimals.
This unit focuses on multiplying and dividing rational numbers, which includes extending students’ understanding of the meaning of those operations and of place value. Students use contexts and representations (fraction bars, arrays, and grids) to solve problems involving multiplication and division of fractions and decimals. Students also apply their understandings of multiplication and division to solve measurement conversion problems.
This unit focuses on classifying triangles and quadrilaterals based on their properties and on using patterns to describe how the perimeters and areas of rectangles change when the dimensions of the rectangle change. Students examine how categories of polygons are related and how a figure can belong to more than one category. As they build sequences of related rectangles, they analyze numerical relationships and practice adding and multiplying mixed numbers and decimals.
Students engage in scientific modeling as they construct explanations for why we experience day and night, the reasons for changing shadows over the course of a day, and the causes of changing hours of daylight over the year.
Students are introduced to the idea that all matter is made of particles too small to see, and that each different substance is made particles (molecules) that are unique. Fifth graders are challenged to solve two problems: how to separate mixtures and how to make unmixable substances mix. Students explore the nature of solids, liquids and gasses and investigate various properties of materials.
Students integrate their elementary experiences to explore ecological interdependencies. Students build terrariums and aquariums and combine them to create a self-sustaining ecocolumn. While carefully observing the plants and animals in their healthy ecosystems, students simultaneously design experiments to test the effects of everyday pollutants such as salt, acid rain, and fertilizer run-off on unpopulated ecocolumns.
In grade 5 students begin to explore the origins and structures of the United States government. They will have the opportunity to read the Preamble to and select sections of the Constitution and begin to learn about concepts such as individual rights and responsibilities, equality, the rule of law, general welfare, limited government, and representative democracy.
Students will be introduced to the three branches of the U.S government and learn about the function of each branch and the system of checks and balances.
In addition students will begin learning about the history and legacy of slavery in the United States by reading, thinking, talking and writing about a variety of stories. They will work with literature that has been selected to support the beginning examination of the guiding question “How has the enslavement of people shaped the history of the United States, and how does that history impact life today?”
Students will learn about the civil rights movement in the past in addition to current day civil rights movements in the United States.