The fifth grade literacy program provides high-quality texts combined with engaging reading and writing workshops to strengthen students’ critical skills. Weekly and unit instruction is built around science and social studies concepts that connect each piece of literature, vocabulary, and writing allowing students to build deep knowledge. Independent reading is also expected and encouraged as students select reading-level appropriate books in a wide variety of genres from extensive classroom libraries. Students meet independent reading goals and recommend books to one another. Using award-winning books, students are engaged in a culturally relevant and ethnically diverse text that serve as a springboard for writing and discussion. Highlights of the fifth grade writing experience include: personal narrative stories, descriptive writing, mini-research projects, expository pieces, persuasive writing, and literary responses. Selected pieces move through the writing process to publication. Fifth graders eagerly take on challenges and consistently work to improve their reading, writing, thinking, and discussion skills in a supportive classroom environment
Fifth grade curriculum puts a great emphasis on the application of mathematics in real world situations as students use basic operations with whole numbers. In Grade 5, math instruction focuses on three critical areas:
• developing fluency with all basic operations with fractions,
• 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
• developing understanding of volume.
By the end of fifth grade, students explore Earth’s materials and systems. They use models and data to investigate factors that affect climate and the cycling of water. Students should explain the impact on earth’s resources and climate when analyzing relationships between humans and the environment. Students examine inherited traits and variations and how these variations lead to species survival. In physical science, they learn about physical properties of matter and chemical reactions by discovering matter is not destroyed, only changed. Investigating forces and motion, students focus on balanced and unbalanced forces and explore patterns of change in physical systems along with gravitational forces
Fifth grade curriculum focuses on the history of the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries. Students study the major American wars, industrialization, the Gilded Age, Progressive Era, and the Civil Rights Movement. In addition, students examine the history of Tennessee, including the cultural, geographic, economic, and political influences on the state and its development. Students will utilize primary and secondary sources , geographic tools, analysis, and critical thinking within this concentrated study of Tennessee history.
Our elementary school provides a warm, friendly, and dynamic environment that fosters critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity, developing a lifelong love of learning. It implements a high-quality curriculum that is aligned with state standards, built on high expectations, highly rigorous, and meets the needs of all students.
