Course Descriptions for Fifth Grade Classes
Grade 5 | Communication Arts
This course is designed to expose the student to novels and poetry. It includes an introduction to critical thinking skills during the beginning of the course year. Novels that share a common theme will enable the student to spend the year examining that theme from a variety of angles and perspectives. The theme for this course is courage. The selected novels include a fun read in American Tall Tales and a more serious, compelling one—Number the Stars. The units are built around the novels. Each novel's lessons focus on drawing the student into the reading by asking questions and offering activities that provide the student opportunities to reflect on life lessons learned thus far. The student will also examine the attitudes and behaviors of the characters from the stories. Critical thinking skills are intertwined with novel activities in order to sharpen the student's analytical abilities. Reading comprehension picks up where the critical thinking lessons end. This will allow the student to practice identifying main ideas and themes in any given reading passage.
The basic writing content concentrates on writing quality sentences, organizing paragraphs, summary writing, and adding detail to writing. Grammar is included in this course to provide year-long exposure to the parts of speech and their functions. Writing conventions are also covered to ensure the student can punctuate appropriately. Spelling is worked into the course with Zaner-Bloser’s Spelling Connections. High-frequency spelling words, easily confused words, state names, abbreviations, and common transitional words are used to build every spelling list. The student will see the practical use of these words as soon as he begins the lessons. In addition to the course content, we utilize personal journals as an opportunity for the student to write on topics of personal interest, about his particular feelings, or just for fun and creativity.
Student Resources
• Reading Comprehension Level E (Steck-Vaughn)
• Critical Thinking Level E (Steck-Vaughn)
• American Tall Tales (Puffin Books)
• Number the Stars
• Shiloh
• The Sign of the Beaver
• Activity Pages 5 (Calvert School)
• Grammar and Usage G (Calvert School)
• Spelling Connections 5 (Zaner-Bloser)
• Reading G and Writing G Lesson Manual
· Grade 5 | Mathematics
The focus of previous courses has been using the four operations with whole numbers. The Calvert series textbook, Calvert Math, and the Practice and Enrichment Workbook are the primary resources for this course. In this course, the student will further refine his skills in all four operations, as the operations are practiced with greater and greater numbers. However, the student will now use the operations in combining decimals and fractions. Measurement is a hands-on unit that covers both customary and metric units of length, capacity, and weight. The student will use formulas to find the perimeter, area, and volume of objects including the circumference of a circle. The student will also learn to combine measurements, including renaming. The study of geometry will get more complicated as the student learns more about polygons and solid figures. The student will learn how to translate figures in a plane. Finally, the student will extend his knowledge of graphing to include circle graphs and will be able to use statistics to make predictions.
Throughout the course, the student will be given the opportunity to apply the skills learned in different ways. To assist with this, the student will study the problem-solving process. A four-step problem-solving plan is taught and numerous problem-solving strategies and skills are introduced and practiced. Many of these will then be applied to different types of problems.
Student Resources
• Calvert Math 5 (Calvert School)
• Calvert Math Practice and Enrichment Workbook 5 (Calvert School)
• Math G Lesson Manual
· Grade 5 | Science
Science is an ongoing process that constantly renders new discoveries! Throughout this course the student will be sharpening his investigative skills and expanding upon his existing knowledge in order to make his own new discoveries. The McGraw-Hill/National Geographic series textbook, Science, and the science kit are the primary resources for the course. The opening unit continues to explore the jobs of scientists and the scientific method. The Life Science units continue to investigate the living world. The Physical Science units examine the characteristics of matter, sound, and light. The Earth Science units provide an opportunity for the student to design experiments to investigate Earth's composition and the factors that affect its composition.
In this course, the student will investigate how the sun's angle affects warming, make an instrument to explore sound, design an experiment to investigate what makes the Earth's crust move, make a model that shows how saltwater can be made drinkable, and perform many other interesting experiments!
The lessons in this course are designed to accommodate many learning styles, and to provide a variety of opportunities for the entire family to participate in the student’s education. Some lessons, or groups of lessons, in each unit are activity-centered, which allow the student to engage the new concepts he encounters through exploration and discovery; others are more traditional, requiring the student to read, research, and reflect on the underlying theory. The student may choose to read and review a fiction or nonfiction book about the subject being studied, undertake a project that reflects a particular personal interest, or participate in an appropriate online interactive experience. The student may include others in a longer-term project such as creating a family garden, or by visiting and reporting on a trip to a farm, zoo, nature center, aquarium, or museum.
Student Resources
• McGraw-Hill Science 5 (McGraw-Hill)
• Activity Pages 5 (Calvert School)
• Science G Lesson Manual
• Science Kit
· Grade 5 | Missouri Social Studies
In this course, the student will study United States history. This course takes both a thematic and chronological approach to U.S. history. The student will trace U.S. history from the time of the earliest Americans through the 21st century. The course begins by describing the geography of America. The student will also learn about the native people who inhabited America prior to European exploration and colonization.
Concurrent to lessons on U.S. history, the student will study United States geography, as well as the geography of the Western Hemisphere including North America, South America and Latin America. The student will study each of the 50 states with regard to climate, resources, industries, national parks and monuments, landforms, waterways, and population. The student will also study each state within the larger context of its region, and learn how states are organized into regions, and identify the characteristics that define each region.
Student Resources
• Build Our Nation (Houghton-Mifflin)
• Activity Pages 5 (Calvert School)
• Student Atlas (Pearson/Scott Foresman)
• Build Our Nation (Houghton-Mifflin)
• Geography G and Social Studies G Lesson Manual