This year we will be making a special effort to continue to improve writing skills. Students will use many forms of writing, such as persuasive paragraphs,narrative writing, poems, descriptive writing, and research reports. They will also write for different purposes - to ask for information, to express feelings, to summarize what they have learned. We will be working closely with our school library media specialist, Margie Sawyer, to teach the students the fine art of doing research for reports, and to polish their keyboarding skills. This year we will be focusing on learning the parts of speech, spelling, and improving writing skills using the 6 trait + One writing skills. The writing traits are: ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency and conventions (mechanics). Not all of these traits will be assessed in every writing assignment. Students will know before hand what the trait is that is being assessed . Students will also learn how to assess their own work. Fifth graders have access to computers in the classroom to publish their work. The spelling grade comes from their writing and knowing the words on the Most Frequently Used Word List. We will be stressing 100% accuracy of commonly used words list. Students will be given a list of spelling words each week from the Zaner-Bloser text and will be be tested on them at the end of the week. These words must also be spelled correctly in assignments across the curriculum.

5th Grade Writing.doc overview

Weekly Spelling Lists

U.S. History

History curriculum

Math is much more than manipulating numbers. The goal of math education today is to help children become problems solvers. This means teaching kids to observe the world around them by looking for patterns and relationships, estimating, measuring, comparing and using reasoning skills. Below are general topics that will be covered in the math class this year.

Number sense - basic arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions), estimation, and reasonableness of answers.

Measurement - standard and metric

Spatial Sense - geometric shapes and solids

Probability - develop understanding of chance, and prediction

Problem Solving - students will learn a variety of strategies

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NTCM) recommends integration of calculator use in math skills. After students have mastered basic facts, learned estimation strategies, and developed number sense, calculators should be used to explore numbers concepts, to complete lengthy computations necessary for problem solving, and for self-checking. A classroom set of calculators is provided for student use. Students are not to bring calculators from home.

Prayers to Memorize

Our Father

Hail Mary

Apostle's Creed

Glory Be

Mysteries of the Rosary

Gloria at Mass

Religion

We will be using a variety of materials in religion class this year. Students will also be attending weekly Friday Masses and prayer services. 5th grade students will be using the Religion text: Blest Are We.  The focus this year is an in-depth study of the sacraments.

Steps to Respect

We will be continuing with the Steps to Respect program . The 5th grade program  helps students to work cooperatively with one another by demonstrating respect and care for one another.  Students are given tools to help them become good friends.

Science

We will be using the FOSS science kits again this year. It is a hand-on program where students learn by investigating, experimenting, gathering data, organizing results, and drawing conclusions based on their own experiments. The students in the past have really enjoyed all of these science experiments!