Overview of Curriculum

English Language Arts: 

All students will continue to develop effective strategies for reading and writing through daily instruction and focused practice. Please encourage your students to read at least 30 minutes a day at home every day. Any kind of reading is fine – information books, comic books, newspapers, magazines, novels . . . and will benefit your child more than any other academic activity.  Students will read from a variety of genres at reading levels appropriate to their individual learning needs. We will be investigating different formats of writing this year, including information reports, letters, personal narratives and creative fiction. Students will follow the writing process for major assignments, including pre-writing, drafting, revising and editing.  

Math:

There are three main components to our math program.

The first area is computations. Students in the middle years need to be flexible in working with numbers and have a solid understanding of mathematical operations. Fluency in basic math facts is essential.  Students should practice basic facts daily until mastered. All students will have an online Xtramath account to work on for homework, and optional booklets for additional practice. Students will develop a variety of personal strategies to solve increasingly complex operations. We will be working on computations throughout the year. 

The second area is new concepts.  Grade 5 and 6 students will work on the same essential skills within each concept area but with slightly different targets. Our first unit will focus on patterning and algebra. Students will learn to recognize and identify patterns in number relationships, create algebraic expressions to represent these patterns and predict future outcomes.

The final area is Problem Solving. Problem Solving will be integrated throughout the math program and is an important format for independently applying new concepts and computation strategies. If you can, try to relate math to real world situations that occur in your everyday life.

Social Studies:

 

The grade 5 and 6 Social Studies programs both have “citizenship” at their core – and involve skill and knowledge components. We will begin the year focusing on Canadian citizenship and the democratic election process to connect with our up-coming mayoral election, and ground us in the present. We will then move into our exploration of the historic events that have contributed to Canada’s growth as a nation while investigating the essential question “How do we know about our distant past?”

Science:

The middle science curriculum provides opportunities for students to investigate various branches of science, including Biology, Earth Sciences and Physics. The focus for our first unit of study will be the Diversity of Living Things – with a focus on the Plant Kingdom.  The science program includes knowledge targets as well as scientific process skills.