Fifth and Sixth grades

As the oldest class in the school, fifth and sixth graders are grappling with identity development and facing a new set of social issues. Moving into pre-adolescence, students find that building friendships and relationships has new challenges and deeper possibilities. Students become more independent in their own learning, and they take more ownership over the daily maintenance of the physical and social facets of the classroom.

It is an age where students can wrestle with more complex and abstract questions and are eager for rich, integrated, and challenging work. An emphasis on cooperation, collaboration, and community forms the core of our social and academic curricula and enhances students’ ability to work together in meeting high academic expectations.

• Through modeling, role plays, and discussion, students learn explicit language and skills to solve conflicts. For example, based on the Positive Discipline model, students identify how the four mistaken goals of power, revenge, assumed inadequacy, and attention are often the source of a problem, as well as the beginning of a solution.
• Students lead decision-making and conflict resolution each day in class meeting. There they set and run the agenda, which includes compliments/appreciations, social issues, and future plans.
• The year starts with a three-day, two-night, community-building camping and ropes course experience at Project Adventure in Beverly, MA.
• Through regular participation in cooperative games and group initiatives, students practice real-life problem-solving and communication skills while having fun.
• This work of blending the social and academic curricula culminates in a sixth-grade, graduation trip to New York City.

Theme

The central theme of the fifth and sixth grades is Freedom, focusing in alternate years on the United States and the world. Ripe for discussions about fairness and able to explore issues and events from present day and long ago, global and local, this theme engages fifth and sixth graders’ appetite for thinking and looking critically at the world. While reading, writing, math, and art are incorporated into this broad topic, social studies and science units form the backbone of our theme study.

In the United States focus year, students study women’s suffrage, U.S. government, the labor movement, bridge building, and optics. Additionally, a health education unit teaches students about puberty and growth, and has a strong focus on exploring self-identity and teaching media-literacy skills.

• Students build their own pinhole cameras to learn how light travels and forms images, and build their own projectors and telescopes while exploring the properties of lenses.
• Students learn about how women’s roles and rights have changed over time by studying the multiple perspectives of pro- and anti- suffragists and learning about the activism involved in the suffrage movement; they interview an important older woman in their own lives, and they study women’s roles in government and politics today.
• Students learn about the forces of compression and tension when they design and construct suspension bridges between two classroom chairs using cardboard, string, and heavy books.
• Students visit and explore the Lawrence Heritage State Park Visitor’s Center in Lawrence, MA, the site of the famous Bread and Roses strike of 1912, a turning point in the Labor Movement.

During the world focus year, students study globalization, environmental science, electricity, and magnetism.

• Students discover the effects of the global market when they compete in a simulation for foreign investment for their own country.
• Groups of students act as factory owners to design their own just “codes of conduct” statements after learning about the role unions have played fighting for social justice in improving factory working conditions, and analyzing the codes of conduct of actual global clothing corporations.
• Students design experiments to test the effects of decomposition of organic and inorganic materials under different conditions in home- made terrariums.
• Fifth and sixth graders are responsible for collecting Atrium’s recycleables. They gather data and analyze it to help improve the school’s rate of recycling. Students visit several local recycling centers, where they see how recycleables are sorted and turned into new products
• Students build a working motor powered by electromagnetic force
• Students visit and work for a day at a local organic farm to learn about local and organic food production. This experience enriches the students’ study of local and global food production and the connected issues of fair trade and equity.

Reading/Writing

As content areas involve more reading in the upper grades, students work on making meaning and gaining understanding of informational text. During Reader’s Workshop, students read independently after brief skill lessons that center around comprehension strategies. They practice reading skills while reading books of their choice, confer with teachers who guide their reading growth, and share their learning with their classmates. Through their two years in the Trailblazer classroom, students read genres ranging from poetry to non-fiction and learn skills to improve as readers of these specific genres. Mini-lessons include:

• Discerning main topics from important details in non-fiction text
• Making inferences
• Summarizing and synthesizing
• How authors use powerful and descriptive language

Math

Students study several math topics concurrently in order to develop skills, explore concepts, and strengthen their understanding of the connections within mathematics. Emphasis is placed on problem solving and both oral and written communication of understanding. Curricula drawn from include the TERC Investigations and Connected Math series.

• Students bake brownies and create model houses in their discovery of fractions, decimals, and percents.
• Students analyze data collected during science experiments by finding different averages, plotting trends, and predicting further data outcomes.
• Students interpret map scales to calculate how far various fruit traveled from where it was grown in order to get to their local grocery store as part of the social and environmental impact of food production.