Fifth Grade Policies

Grading Guidelines: Report card grades for 5th graders are averaged counting major evaluations at 60% of the grade and daily grades as 40% of the grade.

Homework: Parents should expect between 45-50 minutes of homework per night. This will include reading minutes, math, language arts, and integrated.

Language Arts

Program Description – The Plano I. S. D. Elementary Language Arts Program provides a balanced approach to literacy instruction requiring a curriculum framework that gives reading and writing equal status and combines the best theory and learning strategies to match the learning styles of individual children. This framework recognizes the importance of the cognitive and affective dimensions of literacy and acknowledges the meaning-making involved in the reading and writing processes. The Elementary Language Arts program is designed to:

1. Orchestrate a safe classroom environment which facilitates student experiences that provide opportunities for listening and speaking.
2. Provide authentic settings for practicing strategies and skills taught in large and small groups.
3. Assure a climate that promotes a love of reading and writing that will nurture lifelong learning.
4. Provide a literacy-rich environment where texts are read aloud daily as a model for fluent reading expression, for developing structural awareness of fiction and non-fiction while facilitating growth in vocabulary.
5. Include authentic literature of various genre, e.g. fiction, informational text, poetry, fantasy, biography, science fiction, etc.
6. Instill teacher-student discourse to facilitate higher-order thinking skills.
7. Teach phonemic awareness and letter knowledge in a sequential way to facilitate reading and writing development.
8. Provide a continuous progress program facilitating students as they advance to more difficult reading levels across the grades.
9. Provide a basic skills focus with early introduction and continuous maintenance of oral and written language, word attack, vocabulary, and comprehension skills.
10. Promote reading growth through a balanced program that ties phonics, spelling, and language skills to connected texts in reading and writing.
11. To produce readers who approach the reading task expecting meaning and who use phonological, syntactical, and semantical clues in decoding.
12. Deliver guided reading instruction daily at the child’s instructional reading level (90-94% accuracy) allowing students to move from level to level in such a way that they are successful but challenged to grow.
13. Guide students to use the strategies of making connections, questioning, visualizing, inferring, determining importance, and synthesizing during the reading and rereading process.
14. Provide all students reading materials and time for independent (oral and silent) reading (95-100% accuracy) daily. This is essential for developing fluency and appropriate rate.
15. Insure that students develop reading comprehension strategies as outlined by the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS).
16. Deliver writing instruction based on the five step writing process, six traits of effective writing, and the support needed by students as they grow in written composition. Written communication will integrate proficient penmanship and the mechanical skills of writing.
17. Use reflective teaching practices to continually assess student progress through observing, evaluating, and planning instruction.
18. Provide instruction that meets the developmental needs of all students but is designed to promote acceleration in the language arts processes with the goal of all students reading and writing at their potential.

Math

The 5th grade mathematics program provides opportunities for students to value mathematics, to become confident in their ability to do mathematics, and stresses the importance of experiences that relate mathematics to the real world. The curriculum is based on the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) and is designed to build basic understandings in number, operations, and quantitative reasoning; patterns, relationships, and algebraic thinking; geometry and spatial reasoning; measurement; and probability and statistics. Problem solving, language and communication, connections within and outside mathematics and formal and informal reasoning underlie all content areas.

Plano provides valuable curriculum through which these goals are attained. Majority of the school year, 5th graders are working through the following Connected Math series: Prime Time, Bits and Pieces, How Likely Is It?, Data About Us, and Covering and Surrounding. The remainder of the year, the curriculum is supplemented with Scott Foresman’s Investigations. Fifth Grade Integrated Curriculum

The fifth grade integrated curriculum is based on 6 overarching ideas (or OI’s). They are:

• Interactions
• Continuity and Change
• Systems
• Balance and Stability
• Diversity
• Communication

Each OI is a combined instructional sequence involving science and social studies.

Integrated Curriculum

Year-At-A-Glance