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Grade 5 Curriculum

Grade 5

LANGUAGE ARTS
The purpose of the grade five language arts curriculum is to develop life-long readers through personal growth in the skills of independent readers who can communicate effectively in both written and oral language.

MATH
In grade 5, the focus is on three critical areas: (1) developing fluency with addition and subtraction of fractions, and developing understanding of the multiplication of fractions and of division of fractions in limited cases (unit fractions divided by whole numbers and whole numbers divided by unit fractions); (2) extending division to 2-digit divisors, integrating decimal fractions into the place value system and developing understanding of operations with decimals to hundredths, and developing fluency with whole number and decimal operations; and (3) developing understanding of volume.

SOCIAL STUDIES
The purpose of the social studies curriculum in grade five is to further acquaint the student with his/her world and their place in it, to gain further knowledge of their predecessors who explored and settled the New World, to appreciate the native cultures the explorers interacted with, and to understand the impact settlers had upon their world as they trace the development of the first democracies.

SCIENCE
Students are able to describe that matter is made of particles too small to be seen through the development of a model. Students develop an understanding of the idea that regardless of the type of change that matter undergoes, the total weight of matter is conserved. Students determine whether the mixing of two or more substances results in new substances. Through the development of a model using an example, students are able to describe ways the geosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and/or atmosphere interact. They describe and graph data to provide evidence about the distribution of water on Earth.

Students develop an understanding of the idea that plants get the materials they need for growth chiefly from air and water. Using models, students can describe the movement of matter among plants, animals, decomposers, and the environment and that energy in animals’ food was once energy from the sun. Students are expected to develop an understanding of patterns of daily changes in length and direction of shadows, day and night, and the seasonal appearance of some stars in the night sky.

The crosscutting concepts of patterns; cause and effect; scale, proportion, and quantity; energy and matter; and systems and systems models are called out as organizing concepts for these disciplinary core ideas.