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.