Curriculum

We will be using the OAS (Oklahoma Academic Standards), data, and just plain ol' FUN to drive our instruction for the year! 

Reading & Language Arts:

• We will be using the MyView curriculum through Savvas.  Students will speak and listen effectively in a variety of situations, develop foundational skills for future reading success, apply critical thinking skills, expand their working vocabularies to effectively communicate and understand texts, apply knowledge of grammar and rhetorical style, and engage in inquiry to acquire, refine, and share knowledge through a variety of written, oral, visual, digital, non-verbal, and interactive texts.

Writing:

• We will primarily be focusing on narrative, informative, and opinion writing.  We will develop our skills of incorporating text evidence in our writing and our personal connections to the text, as well as comparing and contrasting multiple stories together as one.  Our goal is to write a multi-paragraph response to a two-story prompt by the end of the year.

Spelling:

• We will be using a different spelling strategy that the students may not be familiar with.  As opposed to passing out a list of words on a Monday and testing on Fridays, students will take a spelling test in the first week of school.  This will determine their spelling level and show us holes that need to be filled with the student's spelling ability.  Students will have a list of words over a specific skill for two weeks.  During this time, we will be doing different activities involving their skill.  We will test on the second Friday and will only pick a certain amount of words off of their list and include a few others that the students will not have studied, but will contain the same skill.  This will allow us to see if students are comprehending the skill.  

Math:

• We will be using many resource tools to help us in the journey of mathematics.  We will be focusing on multi-digit numbers and operations using real-world problems, do all sorts of things with fractions and decimals, describe and graph patterns of change created through numerical patterns, understand and interpret expressions, equations, and inequalities involving variables and whole numbers, explore in depth the world of geometry and measurement, and display and analyze data in various ways.  

Science:

• We will be using science kits that provide our learning with hands-on experiments.  We will also be introducing the "cluster" idea to the students as assessments at the end of units which will reinforce the phenomenon of each standard.  A cluster is a written text, usually with a visual representation, that outlines a situation incorporating the phenomenon, and then follows with three to five multiple choice questions about it.                                                                 

     We will explore:

• • • • • • • • • Matter and Movement of Matter

                • Transfers of Energy

                • Properties and Mixing of Substances

                • Gravitational Force and Distance from the Sun

                • Major Earth Systems

                • Ecosystems and Organisms

Social Studies:

• We will be using Savvas Realize for our curriculum, along with several other resources.   We will use research projects over various themes within units, present them, and then focus on the reflection of our work.   We will put emphasis on an essential question of each unit, important figures, and the perspectives of all groups of people during specific time periods.                           

Our units will cover:

• • • • • • • • •  Plymouth, Roanoke, and Jamestown 

                •  The 13 Colonies 

                •  The American Revolution