Don’t be alarmed if you see Fifth Grade students rolling dice in the classroom. Add to that playing Multiplication Baseball, M&Ms Charting and Graphing and Fairy Tale Fractions and you’ve learned a few of the games used to master fractions, percentages and decimals, not to mention making them fun and memorable. Geometric shapes and their qualities are given a new twist in a visual survey of the entire school and its unique architectural elements. This exercise reveals countless angles, arcs, circles, cylinders, parallelograms and the like and brings geometry into our everyday environment.
In language arts, writing styles are fine-tuned – again exploring narrative, descriptive, expository and persuasive. Each student keeps a Writer’s Workshop binder of their work for the year and can compare their personal progress from their writing in the Fourth Grade.
As a combined language arts and social studies project, each winter students in the Fourth and Fifth grades work together and individually to create a presentation, complete with music and artwork that they present on stage in the auditorium.
By the Fifth Grade, Spanish is taking on more structure and in addition to songs and games, vocabulary words are introduced and learned.
A highlight in Fifth Grade is a week spent participating in the national Starbase-Atlantis program. This five-day program immerses students in engineering, math and science. They build a rocket ship and launch it, experiment with air and velocity, learn the process of engineering a product and even learn to virtually simulate a product using computer-aided design. Curiosities are peaked and many a budding Scientist, Mathematician and Engineer are born from this experience.
By the end of the school year, the Fifth Graders are ready, prepared and very excited to progress to the second floor of the building, the Upper School!