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2009 - 2010
(approved 8/27/09)
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Language Arts |
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The 5th grade language arts program integrates reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing and is therefore aligned with the New Jersey Language Arts/Literacy Standards. These elements are integrated through the use of the Signatures program materials from Harcourt Brace (1999) and the Writer's Express writing books from Great Source, a division of Houghton Mifflin Publishing Co., as well as selected trade books that serve as models for specific elements of writing craft. The oral expression component develops students' abilities to express information, thoughts, feelings, and ideas. Activities range from discussion and dramatizations to formal oral reports using multimedia. The listening component refines students' awareness as they attend to spoken language for various purposes such as gaining information, understanding directions, increasing word meaning and knowledge, determining shades of meaning and feelings, enjoyment, and evaluating the ideas of the text. The focus of the viewing component is to make students critical viewers, interpreters, and assessors of visual media. The program in written expression continues to focus on the recursive nature of the writing process that includes pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, publishing, and use of technology in gathering data. Students learn varied methods and strategies for organization, including graphic organizers, outlining, and clustering ideas. In the gathering of data students are taught to discriminate between original and borrowed information available through technology. As students revise their drafts, they focus on the organization of their thoughts, their use of details, their inclusion of transitions, and how to take compositional risks. They also focus on the importance of varied sentence structure, appropriate usage, precise word choice, and effective mechanics that include spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. Rubrics are used as benchmarks to determine students' strengths and needs. Integrating writing across the curriculum areas enables students to write for varied audiences, "publishing" works proudly on bulletin boards, letters, class anthologies, projects, poetry, and in books to share with others. Building upon their work in previous grade levels, fifth grade students are responsible for writings in four general areas that include: narrative writing, informational writing, functional writing, and writing in response to literature. Representative forms of these kinds of writing may include book reviews, persuasive essays, personal narratives, character sketches, news stories, humorous stories, poetry, letters to the editor, comparison and contrast writings, and research reports. It is through the use of models from the teacher's own writing, the student anthology, trade books, content reading, and samples in Writer's Express that students develop sensitivity to the style and structure of language. Other Grade 5
Programs
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