English Language Arts
Reading
Fifth grade students this year will use the Reader's Workshop model. The foundation of Reader's workshop is students reading books on their level while practicing a strategy that is modeled in class. The majority of our reading time is spent with the students reading their independent reading books that they bring from home or choose from my library. Their responsibility is to read... a lot; my responsibility is to keep them engaged in reading and to guide them through the reading strategies so that they become better readers.
Writing
Fifth grade students this year will use the Writer's Workshop model. Just like Reader's workshop, students will spend the majority of their time writing while practicing the strategies that I model. I like to use high quality mentor texts as a guide. Because all students work at a different rate, some students will complete more writing pieces than others.
The students will produce at least 1 piece in the following genres:
*Personal Narrative
*Informational Essays
*Persuasive Essay
*Historical Fiction Story
*Poetry
The students will produce at least 1 piece in the following genres:
*Personal Narrative
*Informational Essays
*Persuasive Essay
*Historical Fiction Story
*Poetry
Vocabulary
Every morning begins with learning new vocabulary. We call this their "Brain Breakfast." Each day we delve into a new word, discuss it, and break it apart in order to understand it. Students will be given their vocabulary words at the beginning of the week and they'll be tested on them at the end of the week.
Spelling
Each week students will be given a list of words that follow a specific spelling pattern. On Monday they'll be given a pretest on the list. We'll do activities on the words throughout the week in class and for homework. On Friday they will be tested. In addition, each week students will get two "Nifty Thrifty Fifty" words. These words have common prefixes, suffixes, and roots. By breaking up and understanding these words, it will help the students to understand and decode new words which have the same word parts.