Syllabus

DONNETTE DURHAM

5TH GRADE 2020-2021

LANGUAGE ARTS AND SOCIAL STUDIES

ALICE CARLSON APPLIED LEARNING CENTER

Describing the full scope of what we are going to learn this year is a daunting task, one that is going to take some serious time. I'll get it started by stopping for a minute and looking over my work with 5th graders over the last few years and thinking about how to summarize the enormous amount of work we are about to do.

We’ll cover 250 years or so worth of United States history. As we go there will be some parts of the history where we will barely scratch the surface in order to dive more deeply into some other areas. I will select three or four overarching themes in history for us to explore rather than limiting our work to chronological lumps. We will be guided by essential questions and will explore multiple perspectives in our work. We will write a lot about historical choices and support different viewpoints and choices that were made as this country developed and grew and expanded and exploded with people and ideas and beliefs and guiding principles. Our primary writing work will be in the form of expository essays - explanatory and argumentative or expository. We will do a bit of narrative writing as well - primarily in the form of journal entries and point of view pieces. In reading we will endeavor to move all the way to level W by the end of the year, mastering increasingly complex text by reading and reading and reading some more - both informational and fictional narratives. We’ll read every day at home and during school. My biggest goal in teaching is to help students grow as a readers by practicing every single day, by helping them realize that this is very probably the most vital and important skill they will learn. Reading unlocks all other areas of study and it MUST become an integral part of students' lives in order for them to realize their dreams.