• 5th Grade Reading Curriculum

    Building a Reading Life - Routines and Jobs of a Reader

    • Throughout each stage of a book, a reader’s job will change allowing deeper thinking about the plot, characters and author’s message.
    • How to monitor for sense, synthesizing, using context clues to make meaning of difficult vocabulary words.

     
    Interpretation Book Clubs

    • Readers draw on a repertoire of ways for reading closely and noticing how story elements interact
    • Readers understand how different authors develop the same theme
    • Readers compare and contrast texts that develop a similar theme

     
    Moving Up Levels of Nonfiction

    • Readers use different strategies to understand informational text
    • Features of informational text allow the reader to gather information on a topic and access the information more quickly and easily
    • Emphasis on fluency and word solving, which are required to read complex nonfiction

     
    Researching Debatable Issues

    • Students read complex nonfiction texts to conduct research on a debatable topic
    • Students consider perspective, evaluate arguments, and formulate their own evidence-based positions on issues

    Fantasy Book Clubs: The Magic of Themes and Symbols

    • Students work in clubs to develop higher-level thinking skills and study how authors develop characters and themes
    • Students think metaphorically and analytically, and consider the conflicts, themes, and lessons learned

     

    5th Grade Writing Curriculum

    Building a Writing Life - Routines and Jobs of a Writer

    • Develop routines that will produce effective writing

     
    Narrative Craft

    • Students grow and use their knowledge of narrative craft to make their stories more thematic

     
    Research Reports

    • 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

     
    Research-Based Argument Essay

    • Writers reveal their opinion through structure, word choice, and evidence used.
    • Writers choose the editorial as a genre for a specific purpose - to persuade others to change.
    • Students learn to build powerful arguments that convincingly balance evidence and analysis to persuade readers to action

     
    From Essay and Narrative to Memoir

    • This unit helps students grasp that form follows content, learning 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