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. 

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.

During a study of the US Constitution and after students have already read the Constitution, students explore the philosophical underpinnings of it and decide which of the different influences on it ultimately had the biggest impact on the Founding Fathers’ thinking. This lesson was developed by NCDPI as part of the Academically and/or Intellectually Gifted Instructional Resources Project. This lesson plan has been vetted at the state level for standards alignment, AIG focus, and content accuracy.

In this lesson, students will develop skills for historical and geographical analysis, with regard to Virginia's central role in the Civil War, including the ability to: a) identify and interpret primary and secondary sources to understand events in history; b) determine cause and effect relationships; d) draw conclusions and make generalizations; f) sequence events in Virginia history; g) interpret ideas and event from different historical perspectives; h) evaluate and discuss issues orally and in writing; i) analyze and interpret maps to explain relationships among landforms, water features, climatic characteristics, and historical events.

This 5th Grade Social Studies Unit supports the understanding of the role of various people, events, and ideas in shaping the United States. 

After reading the Wonder's anchor text “The Unbreakable Code” and the paired selection “Allies in Action” students will create a MakeyMakey to discuss the changes the US Government felt about the Navajo and African Americans in WW2.

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.