Fifth Grade Language Arts

​​Language Arts 500 continues to build on the sequential development and integration of communication skills in four major areas—reading, writing, speaking, and listening. It most specifically focuses on deepening and furthering students’ understanding in the following ways: Reading- develops students’ basic reading skills, including the identification of main ideas, supporting details, sequence, and facts and opinions; introduces more advanced reading skills, showing students how to make inferences and derive implied meanings; shows students how to identify parts of speech in sentences, with emphasis on nouns, adverbs, and verb tenses; develops students’ capacities for identifying basic elements of narrative prose; introduces students to types of nonfiction, including biographies, autobiographies, and short essays; helps students develop basic literary comprehension skills through the reading of excerpts from Beowulf, Call it Courage, and Gulliver’s Travels and of various short stories, nonfiction pieces, and poetry. Writing- develops students’ understanding of sentence structure, providing hands-on experience with subject-verb agreement and parts of speech; emphasizes parts of speech and their roles, including adjectives, nouns, and verbs; familiarizes students with roots, affixes, and basic word relationships, including homonyms, synonyms, and antonyms; develops students’ vocabulary and spelling skills.

Curriculum Focus

• Understanding Main Ideas and the Author’s Message Through Vocabulary
• Reading Stories and Poetry to Review Comprehension Skills, Mood, and Compound Words.
• Exploring Parts of Speech Language Including Prefixes, Suffixes, Homonyms, and Idioms.
• Applying Strategies for Effective Communication in Writing and Speech.
• Reading And Writing Stories Efficiently Including Use of Dialogue.
• Identifying Characteristics of Different Types of Poetry.
• Exploring Reading Passages and Applying Knowledge of Story Parts and Language.
• Using Language Effectively To Describe And Compare.
• Planning, Drafting, and Editing a Research-Based Report.