What Your Fifth Grader Needs to Know

Book excerpt: What should your child learn in the fifth grade? How can you help him or her at home? This book answers these important questions and more, offering the specific shared knowledge that thousands of parents and teachers across the nation have agreed upon for American fifth graders. Featuring sixteen pages of illustrations, a bolder, easier-to-follow format, and a thoroughly updated curriculum, What Your Fifth Grader Needs to Know is designed for parents and teachers to enjoy with children. Hundreds of thousands of children have benefited from the Core Knowledge Series, and this edition gives a new generation of fifth graders the advantage they need to make progress in school today and to establish an approach to learning that will last a lifetime. Discover: • Favorite Poems—old and new, from Langston Hughes’s “I, Too” to Lewis Carroll’s famous nonsense poem “Jabberwocky” • Literature—from around the world, including Native American stories, Japanese tales, and condensed versions of classics, from Don Quixote to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass • Learning About Literature—the rules of written English, pats of speech, literal and figurative language, common sayings and phrases, and a brief introduction to researching and writing a report • World and American History and Geography—explore latitude and longitude; Aztec, Inca, and Maya civilizations; European history during the Age of Exploration, the Renaissance, and the Reformation; and American history topics, including the Civil War, westward expansion, and the struggle of Native Americans • Visual Arts—art from around the world, from Renaissance paintings to American landscapes to Japanese gardens, with discussions of Leonardo da Vinci, Michaelangelo, and Botticelli—along with more than twenty reproductions. • Music—the basics of understanding, appreciating, and reading music, plus great composers from Beethoven to Mendelssohn and an introduction to African-American spirituals • Math—stimulating lessons, including percentages, number sense, long division, decimals, graphs, and geometry—as well as a quick introduction to pre-algebra • Science—fascinating discussions of taxonomy, atoms, the periodic table, human growth stages, plants, life cycles and reproduction—plus short biographies of famous scientists such as Galileo