Fifth Grade

In 5th grade, your child will read widely and deeply from a range of high-quality, increasingly challenging fiction and nonfiction from diverse cultures and time periods. Students will be able to summarize the key details of stories, poems, and nonfiction materials. They will also be able to identify and judge evidence that supports particular ideas in an author’s argument to change a reader’s point of view. Building knowledge about subjects through research projects, such as a research report, and responding analytically to literary and informational sources will be key to your child’s continuing success. Your child will write stories or essays that are several paragraphs long this school year, such as a compare and contrast essay and a memoir. They will continue to learn how to expand, combine, and reduce sentences to improve meaning, interest, and style of writing. By devoting significant time and effort to producing numerous written pieces over short and extended timeframes throughout the year, he or she also will gain control over many conventions of grammar, usage, and punctuation as well as learn ways to make himself or herself understood.

Coming soon

The classroom focus on arithmetic during the elementary grades will develop into a more formal study of algebra in fifth grade. To be ready for algebra, students must have an understanding of fractional arithmetic, in part because even simple equations cannot be solved without fractions. Because of this, whole-number arithmetic comes mostly to a close in 5th grade, while multiplying and dividing fractions becomes a major focus. This year, students will learn to add and subtract fractions with unlike denominators (e.g., 21/4 - 11/3) and solve word problems of this kind.  They will continue to learn how to multiply and divide fractions in simple cases and solve related word problems. Additionally, they will learn to generalize the place-value system to include decimals and calculate with decimals to the hundredths place.  They will come to understand the concept of volume and learn to solve word problems that involve volume. By the end of the year, they will learn how to graph points on the coordinate plane to solve problems.

Coming soon

Coming soon