5th Grade Specials
NFS Curriculum Update :: May & June, 2015
ART
Fifth grade artists will continue to a unit study on Egyptian Art throughout May. We will be finishing building our clay Sarcophagus and once it is dry and fired we will work on glazing the pieces. We we also be working with plaster, recycled containers and other sculptural materials to build our own "canopic jars" and will learn more about hieroglyphics in order to decorate the jars. It is sure to be an exciting time in the art room!
LATIN
This month 5BF will continue their work with verbs and expand their knowledge of Latin to include other sentence components. Students will take their first grammar quiz on verb conjugation, playing a fun and engaging review game to help them prepare for this assessment. They will also begin to explore some of the most common functions of nouns, such as subjects and direct objects. Students will learn to recognize the role a noun plays in a sentence by looking at its ending. This work will prepare them for their final assignment of the quarter, captioning an original illustration in Latin.
LIBRARY
Fifth grade devotes the month of May to digital citizenship, taught by Sarah Matthews. Their last library class of Lower School is Café Dewey, a hilarious test of their cumulative library knowledge. Students take turns being customers, waiters, and chefs (with costumes and props, of course.) The customers order books from the menu. The chefs use Destiny library catalog to find the call numbers of the books and the waiters must locate the books and serve them to the customer.
MUSIC
I can’t believe it is already May! I have had such a wonderful time working with this fifth grade class. They had a wonderful show last week! I am so proud of them. We will be ending the year doing a research project on our favorite group and/or performer. Thank you for sharing your child with me this year!
P.E.
We will spend much of this month preparing for Field Day. The students will review and practice many of the races and games that will be played on the big day. Following Field Day, the class will participate in outdoor sports involving baseball/softball/kickball type activities as well as large group games that can be played on the fields. At the end of the school year the students will have the opportunity to choose a few of their favorite games and activities that were played during the year and repeat these activities one final time before the end of school.
SCIENCE
Fifth grade start the month of May learning how the hydrosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere and biosphere interact with each other. Students will learn about day and night, the seasons, and the moon. Students will also explore size and proportion of celestial bodies and experiment to understand why the moon and sun seems to be the same size in the sky, when they are actually very different in scale. We also explore the challenge question: If the Earth is the size of a mustard seed and the Moon is as big as a grain of sand, how big is the Sun? Students are given the choice of a marble, golf ball, or tennis ball or basketball. You’ll have to find out from them what the final answer is. We end the year learning about the solar system. including the inner, middle and outer solar system, as well as what makes a planet a planet.
SPANISH
Students in 5CE will continue to develop oral and writing expression through discussion of food and restaurant situations. Students will apply their knowledge by constructing more comprehensive and lengthier sentences. For instance, the food vocabulary they learned in April will now be used with other idiomatic expressions practiced to convey needs, wants, satisfaction or displeasure in a restaurant. The games, activities and drills used to learn the language will assist student’s comfort level in producing the thematic vocabulary.