Mrs. Kantrow's 5th Grade Class

Hello and welcome to fifth grade!  Fifth grade is full of lots of hard work and lots and lots of fun activities, field trips, and privileges.  We work hard, and we play hard! Specific areas of study in my class are discussed below.

Reading:  Through a novel-based curriculum, students will enjoy a variety of literary genres and develop reading skills such as comprehension, inferences, sequence, cause and effect, and summarizing.  Students will engage in shared reading, independent reading, and literature circles.  Class novels includeThe Landry News, The Lightning Thief, Number the Stars, Devil’s Arithmetic, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, Hoot, Walk Two Moons, and A Wrinkle in Time.  Each novel will involve specific areas of study, including the U.S. Constitution, Greek mythology, World War II, penguins, and conservation, and will incorporate some area of technology.  Students will independently read several books of their choosing each quarter within a variety of genres.  

English:  Students will understand the rules of grammar and apply those rules in speaking and writing.  They will learn to recognize the parts of speech and use proper capitalization and punctuation, including commas, quotation marks, apostrophes, semi-colons, and end punctuation.  Fifth grade students will engage in all modes of writing during Writer’s Workshop, including persuasive, descriptive, expository, and narrative writing. Students journal weekly on a variety of assigned topics.  

Social Studies:  Fifth graders will study American history, including ancient America, American explorers, colonial America, and the Revolutionary War.  Students will use and understand maps and globes through use of Daily Geography.  This will include reading different types of maps, latitude and longitude, and directional terms.  Students will also study the U. S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights and their importance to us as American citizens.   Primary areas of focus in the fifth grade social studies curriculum include note taking and study skills that will benefit students in the lifelong learning process.

Project-based learning is an integral part of fifth grade language arts and social studies.  It provides a comprehensive approach to learning and gives a deeper and long-lasting mastery of material and reinforcement of concepts and ideas learned in class.  Project-based learning allows students to engage in real-world, authentic activities collaboratively and/or independently.  Projects begin with the research and writing process; they are often technology based and include the creation of wikis, web pages, PowerPoint presentations, ActivInspire documents, and Microsoft Publisher documents.

In the second semester of fifth grade, we will continue working on reading skills, writing skills, and grammar.  Novels read in the second semester will include Hoot, Number the Stars, Devil's Arithmetic, A Wrinkle in Time, and hopefully Walk Two Moons. Along with Number the Stars and Devil's Arithmetic, we will study World War II and the Holocaust in detail.  In social studies, we will continue traveling through American history learning about the early explorers and the Revolutionary War.   We will begin to focus on skills tested on the ERB, particularly main idea, inferences, analogies, non-fiction reading comprehension, and writing.  We have begun writing Friday Letters to parents to detail academic and behavior accomplishments,information about the content of all classes, fifth grade news, enrichments, upcoming tests, and projects. These letters will promote communication between parents and students, provide students with time to reflect on their week, and work on writing skills such as organization, sentence structure, paragraph division, and mechanics.  They are to be signed and returned each Monday and will be kept in their language arts binder until the end of the school year.

The end of the school year comes very quickly in fifth grade.  The trip to San Antonio and Senior Week are highlights of their career at St. James.  We are looking forward to a rewarding semester.