Students will learn about America's first gold rush, which took place in North Carolina in the early 1800s. They will then utilize their understanding of the gold rush and its affect on North Carolina by completing a creative writing assignment.

Students will learn how the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution was shaped by historical events and how it reflected the fundamental values and principles of a newly independent nation.

This informational text introduces students to the discipline of geology, and specifically polar geology. Students meet Julie Codispoti, assistant curator of the U.S. Polar Rock Repository, and learn how she overcame an initial dislike of science to become a geologist. Students also learn that rocks, like books, can teach us about the world long ago. The text is written at a grade four through grade five reading level. This version is a full-color PDF that can be printed, cut and folded to form a book. Each book contains color photographs and illustrations.

This resource contains resources that will help students understand that writers use different structures to organize nonfiction texts and that readers need to know a variety of reading strategies appropriate for the text and their purpose for reading such text. Reading strategies to use before, during, and after reading are shared as well as graphic organizers.

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 5th Grade ELA. 

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 5th Grade English Language Arts. 

This resource accompanies our Rethink 5th Grade ELA course. It includes ideas for use, ways to support exceptional children, ways to extend learning, digital resources and tools, tips for supporting English Language Learners and students with visual and hearing impairments. There are also ideas for offline learning. 

Per the ReadWriteThink website: In this collaborative inquiry unit, the real gold is the inquiry skills and content area knowledge that students develop. The class works in small groups, each focusing on one aspect of the same big topic, such as the Gold Rush. After skimming related texts, the class brainstorms people, places and things associated with the topic and develops a list of five or six main subtopics. Students then work in small groups to research one of the subtopics, practicing specific research skills as they work. Finally, students choose an activity, such as an oral report, trivia game, or newspaper, to teach what they have learned to the rest of the class. Group accountability and individual responsibility are built in to this lesson process. While this unit uses the Gold Rush as an example, any event or geographical area could be substituted.

In this lesson, students explore how to write from an object’s perspective. The teacher uses a picture book, Dear Mrs. La Rue, to introduce the idea of writing from a non-human’s perspective. A mini-lesson follows in which students work together to define the word "perspective." Students collaboratively write and share a short example of writing from a pencil sharpener’s perspective. Students ultimately write their own stories from an object’s perspective after reading the model story. This lesson takes multiple days as students prewrite, draft, revise, edit, and publish their stories.

This informational text introduces students to the geographic uniqueness of the North and South Poles. The text is written at a grade four through grade five reading level. This is a PDF containing the informational text and a glossary.

In this lesson students will look at the role of international trade between the United States and other countries after the American Revolution. They will look at why trade with China was profitable as well as routes taken to make the most of trading with other countires along the way.

This informational text explores the relationships between various tundra species: marsh marigolds, bot flies, and caribou. The text is at a reading level appropriate for fourth through fifth grade. It is a pdf file that includes text and a glossary.

Fifth grade students in Michigan begin their study of American history with American Indian peoples before the arrival of European explorers and conclude with the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1791.

The last core strand of social studies is the one we will be focusing on mostly this year...history! Your studies will be focusing mainly on American history. It is often said that history is written by the victors. Historians must look at everything they can to come to conclusions about what happened in the past. Historians become writers, teachers, public speakers, and public servants in many ways. The following section explains the work of historians and details about their studies.

In this lesson, the whole class analyzes a photograph and brainstorms words to describe the characters' senses and feelings. A "hot-seating" drama session follows where classmates interview each other, acting as characters in the photograph, and further exploring the characters' feelings. Students are introduced to the idea of using similes and then work in pairs to describe a character's experience. They then create a simply structured poem using their ideas and similes.

On this webpage, students read a brief article about air pressure and wind and how these affect the weather, then study the Beaufort wind scale. Students are then ready to complete a daily observation chart which includestheir observations and the daily wind speed based on the Beaufort scale.

This informational text explores the characteristics of blue whales and a simple food chain of the Southern Ocean. The text is at a reading level appropriate for a reading level of fourth through fifth grades. It is a pdf file that includes only the text and a glossary.

Wonderopolis is a free informational site that asks and answers interesting questions about the world. Wonders of the Day questions are posted daily, and each is designed to get kids to think, talk, and find learning moments in everyday life.

In this lesson, students will use thematically related texts, organized from least to most complex, to gather a word bank of supporting details and content vocabulary about a concept. Then they use these words as a basis for writing acrostic poems, which support organization of information around a central idea, as the lines of an acrostic poem are held together by the topic or main idea spelled vertically.

Students learn about bones and outlines the basic information about each of the major bone groups of the human body. Text for this article is appropriate for the upper elementary grade levels. A Spanish version of the article and a read-aloud option are also provided on the site.