Fifth grade, the final grade before the transition to Middle School, is filled with invigorating learning and personal triumphs. Students take on new responsibilities as the school leaders and thrive on opportunities for both independent growth and cooperative learning. Supported by their teachers, fifth graders soar through new territory in science, literature, mathematics, history, art, music, and more. With a firm foundation in basic skills and solid study habits that promote success, fifth graders are ready for anything!
 
Fifth Grade: Onward and Upward
Language arts studies take students to a higher level of reading and writing this year. Students learn advanced vocabulary, comprehension strategies, and literary devices such as similes and metaphors. They read and discuss novels in differentiated literature circles that give each student the opportunity to work at his or her own level, read aloud daily, improve reading skills, generate questions, and form conclusions about the text.
 
Each student is a writer, keeping a notebook of story ideas, notes, drafts, and completed written pieces. Students use the Six Traits Program of Effective Writing model to improve their writing and participate in writing workshops to learn to think like authors and editors. Ongoing grammar and spelling lessons solidify what students know about clear and effective communication.
 
Math offers new challenges in number theory, geometry, estimating, statistics, graphing, and percents. Students also practice multiple strategies and algorithms for the addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of whole numbers, decimals, and fractions, and have many opportunities to apply their mathematical and critical thinking skills to real-world situations.
 
Learning and Leading
Using the Principia campus as an outdoor science lab, students experience nature through discovery, observation, and immersion. Fifth graders also conduct in-depth studies of levers and pulleys and the solar system. Social studies includes units on geography, ancient Greece, China, and the original 13 colonies.
 
The students continue their rigorous study of Spanish and art. In music, students make huge strides, enabling them to enter the middle school choir with the basic skills to read and memorize more difficult vocal selections. Fifth graders are also introduced to woodwind, brass, and percussion instruments, take instrumental music classes three times per week, and play in the Lower School band.
 
In P.E., fifth graders demonstrate more mature athletic skills, and concentrate on developing teamwork and sportsmanship. Socially, fifth graders deepen their existing relationships and become more effective at working in a group and communicating with others outside their group. Above all, cultivating good character is the centerpiece of the fifth grade experience. Students develop leadership skills, steadfastly work through challenges, and learn to make principled choices, which prepares them well for the next level of their school learning experience.