Fifth Grade

Essential Content

Two fifth-grade students writing: one facing their writing and the other focused on something beyond the camera

Guiding Question: Are All Students Working With Content Aligned to the Appropriate Standards for Their Subject and Grade?

Ensure that all students are working with content aligned to the appropriate standards for their subject area and grade. Each content area listed includes a summary of the priority standards that students should be able to demonstrate proficiency in by the end of kindergarten. These prioritized items are considered foundational understandings that students will build upon in first grade and beyond.

Priority Standards

What students will know, what students will do, and what thinking skills students will develop to apply and transfer understandings that endure within the discipline, leverage deeper understandings, and/or support readiness for success at the next grade level. These are the standards that should anchor and drive instruction.

 

Signature Elements

The practices, strategies, and routines at the core of teaching and learning within the content area/discipline.

Fifth Grade Standards

This is the list of fifth-grade standards found on the SFUSD report card. They represent understandings that endure within the discipline, leverage deeper understandings within the content area, and/or support readiness for success at the next grade level.

Arts
  • Engages and develops the ability to express self with increasing creativity, complexity, and depth through 2D and 3D
    visual art
  • Engages and develops the ability to express self through creative movement and creative expression
  • Engages and develops the ability to create music through instruments, voice, or with objects
Digital Learning
  • Creates and engages with technology independently and collaboratively using several different available digital and media tools.
  • Expresses thinking using a variety of digital formats across content areas
  • Chooses and advocates for the best tool for a specific task when working in a digital environment.
English Language Arts
  • Determines the theme of a story, the main ideas of informational texts and provides supporting details; summarizes the text
  • Uses quotes from the text to explain what the text says and means
  • Writes narratives; establishes a situation, effectively uses narrative techniques, and provides a conclusion
  • Writes informative/explanatory texts; logically develops the topic with facts, details or quotations, and provides a concluding section
  • Writes opinion pieces; states a point of view supported by logically ordered reasons, and provides a concluding section
  • Reports orally on a topic or text or presents orally an opinion in a logical sequence with appropriate details to support ideas
  • Uses grade level phonics and more than one strategy to solve unknown words in a text
  • Uses grade level writing conventions for capitalization, punctuation, and spelling
  • Reads at grade level expectations
English Language Development
  • Contributes to discussions in all settings by asking relevant questions, building on others’ ideas, providing useful feedback and using relevant information
  • Expresses an opinion to persuade and negotiate using complex learned phrases in conversations
  • Listens actively to read alouds, presentations, and discussions by asking and answering detailed questions, restating and paraphrasing
  • Explains ideas, experiences and connections based on a variety of grade-level texts and multimedia
  • Understands and applies how writers and speakers use language
  • Knows and applies basic literacy skills in reading and writing
Health
  • Explains viruses (including HIV) and bacteria, and their relationship to the immune system; practices health- enhancing behaviors
  • Explains internal and external influences that affect food choices and physical activity and accesses valid information
  • Summarizes the structures and functions of major organs in the human reproductive system
History/Social Studies
  • Describes pre-Columbian settlements (geography and climate) and early explorers
  • Locates the 50 states and their capitals
  • Identifies and describes the political, religious, and economic events of the era (Colonial, American Revolution, and Constitution)
  • Understands and explains immigration and settlement patterns from 1789 to mid-1800's
Mathematics
  • Reasons about problems, explains thinking, and considers thinking of others
  • Uses equivalent fractions as a strategy to add and subtract fractions
  • Applies knowledge of multiplication and division to fractions
  • Integrates decimal fractions into the place value system
  • Performs operations with multi-digit whole numbers and decimals
  • Understands volume and relates it to multiplication and addition
  • Analyzes numerical patterns and relationships
  • Makes and interprets line plots using grade level fraction operations
  • Writes and interprets numerical expressions
  • Graphs points on the coordinate plane to solve real-world and mathematical problems
  • Classifies two-dimensional figures into categories based on their properties
  • Converts like measurement units within a given measurement system
Physical Education
  • Strikes a ball from a side orientation
  • Passes using a bounce and chest pass
  • Dribbles an object and shoots at a goal while being guarded
  • Develops short and long term fitness goals
  • Describes components of Health-Related Fitness
Science
  • Asks questions that can be investigated and predicts reasonable outcomes based on patterns such as cause and effect relationships
  • Plans and conducts investigations collaboratively, collecting data to serve as evidence for a scientific explanation of a phenomenon
  • Uses or develops scientific models to explore and test relationships within a natural or designed system
  • Generates and compares multiple solutions to a problem based on how well they meet the criteria and constraints of a design challenge
Social-Emotional Development
  • Works/plays collaboratively with others
  • Regulates emotions and works with focus
  • Approaches challenges as learning opportunities
  • Accomplishes personal and academic goals
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Essential Content CORE Rubric Teaching Practices

Design Lessons that Advance Students to Grade-Level Standards and/or IEP Goals
  • Demonstrate knowledge of subject matter and academic content standards.
  • Address rigor and depth of standards.
  • Select appropriately demanding instructional materials, tasks, texts for grade/course and time in the school year based on guidance in standards, students’ language development, and/or students’ IEP goals (e.g. Lexile level and complexity of text).
  • Use developmentally appropriate practices.
  • Use subject-appropriate pedagogical practices, including those found in SFUSD curricula (Reader’s Workshop, Writer’s Workshop, Math Signature Strategies, ELD practices).
  • Explicitly address how English works through complex texts (i.e. text level, sentence level, phrase level, word level)
  • Develop and provide accommodations and modifications as needed to ensure all students are able to attain learning goals.
  • Address students’ IEP goals and other specific learning needs in developing learning goals and preparing lessons.
  • Design single lessons and sequences of lessons.
    • Develop a vision for student success and standards-aligned, long- and short-term goals that are ambitious, measurable, and appropriate for all students.
    • Develop and/or uses a long-term, sequential plan that leads to mastery of the most important content for the grade or course.
    • Develop and clearly communicate a well-framed, standards-aligned, and appropriately rigorous instructional objective(s) and language objective(s) to describe the goal(s) of the lesson.
    • Develop and/or use daily lesson activities that are well-sequenced and move students toward mastery of grade-level standards.
    • Develop and/or use appropriately demanding instructional materials, such as texts, questions, problems, exercises, and assessments.
  • Plan differentiated instruction considering students’ individual learning needs and levels of readiness, ensuring content is accessible to all students.
  • Anticipate common student misunderstandings given the content and ensure strategies are in place to overcome those misunderstandings.
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Teaches Lesson Content Accurately and Coherently
  • Explain and model accurate content, practices, and strategies, and all content necessary for students to achieve the learning goal(s).
  • Use explanations of content that are clear, coherent, and support student understanding of content.
  • Provide opportunities for engagement and identity exploration through a variety of creative, technological, and artistic forms and disciplines.
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This page was last updated on August 29, 2023