Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project
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Writing Curriculum
The fifth grade curriculum calendar offers instruction in narrative, argument, informational, and poetic writing. The instruction builds on that which has been given across grades K-4, but also recognizes that some students will not have received that prior instruction and need especially intensive opportunities to accelerate their abilities. This instruction enables students to work in each of these fundamental modes with increasing sophistication and with decreasing reliance on scaffolds. For example, first graders write Small Moment stories by recalling an event and retelling it “across their fingers,” whereas fourth graders plot narratives against the graphic organizer of a story booklet, revising the narratives so that beginnings and endings relate to what the story is really about. In a similar manner, from kindergarten through eighth grade, students become progressively more capable of writing opinion (or argument) texts. In first grade, for example, children make and substantiate claims in persuasive letters—by third grade, they learn to use expository structures in order to persuade. By fifth grade, students analyze informational texts to understand conflicting points of view and write argument essays in which they take a stand, drawing on evidence from research.
Reading Curriculum
The fifth grade reading curriculum builds upon the spiral curriculum of grades K-4, continuing the work of moving students up levels of text complexity through independent and guided practice. The goal is for all fifth graders to move into reading texts in the 4-5 band of text complexity with fluency, accuracy and high levels of comprehension, as called for by the Common Core. Readers make this progress through extensive practice, working with texts that are calibrated to be at the highest level of difficulty that they can handle while still reading with 96% accuracy, fluency and comprehension. Their progress is also supported through explicit instruction in the skills and strategies of proficient reading, and through an emphasis on academic vocabulary. As always, students work with teacher-support to read mentor texts, working closely with selected short passages from those texts, and they are taught to transfer close reading practices developed through that close study of shared texts to their independent reading. Reading is supported not just during language arts time but also across the curriculum, and there is an equal division of time spent on reading informational and fiction texts. In fifth grade, we expect students to read at least forty minutes in school and another forty at home—that means you can expect students to read, on average, about sixty pages of text a day, and it’s that volume, along with calibrated instruction on skills matched to their text complexity, that will move readers up levels.