5th Grade English/Language Arts

Students in 5th grade develop skills and approaches for writing across multiple genres, with increasing awareness of audience and purpose. Students use all five stages of the writing process, including prewriting, drafting, revising, proofreading, and publishing. They develop stamina and patience to thoughtfully edit and revise through multiple drafts and engage in frequent feedback opportunities with teachers. They focus on personal narrative, informational, and persuasive genres, and use organizational structures suited to each style. They add sophistication to their writing through the refined use of mechanics, formatting, word choice, transitions, and varied sentence structures. They also learn to peer-critique each other’s work. Writing projects often conclude with celebrations of published student work. 

In the reading program, students practice comprehension strategies that require intentional, interactive engagement with the text such as previewing novel vocabulary and comprehension tasks before starting to read. As they read, they apply active reading skills through making connections from text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world. They practice active reading strategies to make meaning including predicting, summarizing, inferring, and visualizing. Students continue the development of vocabulary through direct instruction as well as word attack strategies. Teachers assess student reading skills regularly and use the information to guide instruction to help build fluency, accuracy, and speed. Students build fluency and speed through frequent reading of informational text, class novels connected to the history curriculum, small group selections, and independent reading.