Looking for ways to plan project based learning activities? Suzie Boss suggests borrowing ideas from your colleagues and adapt or remix to fit your context.

Suzie borrowed ideas from professional development and learning conferences for teachers who may need a boost to get their project-based learning off the ground.

This parent guide supports parents in helping their child at home with the 5th grade ELA content.

This video clip is meant to serve as a writing or discussion prompt during a unit on forces and motion. This can be used at varied grade levels, with the expectation that student responses would be more complex in higher grade levels.

In this lesson, students evaluate the changes Disney made to the myth of "Hercules." By creating a plot diagram of the “real” myth, students hone in on critical differences. They then document these changes in a Venn diagram and discuss the role of audience and purpose in Disney’s decisions through the Think-Pair-Share strategy. Finally, students evaluate the changes for themselves in a summary and critique writing activity.

This lesson plan contains reading, writing, and science integration. Students will view onion cells under the microscope, read and answer questions from a selection about cells, learn a note-taking strategy, and create a writing piece from their outline notes. A rubric is provided for assessment of student work.

How do cells keep us alive? Through reading and hands-on activities, students learn about parts of a cell, and their functions in carrying out processes for life. Study skills are taught and modeled as students make entries in science notebooks.

In this lesson plan, the character of Mama, in Emily's Runaway Imagination by Beverly Cleary, writes to the State Librarian asking for help starting a library in their town. Inspired by the actions in Cleary’s book, students write to their school librarian, requesting that a specific text be added to the school library collection. Students use persuasive writing skills as well as online tools to write letters stating their cases. Students then have an opportunity to share their letters with the librarian.

The North Carolina Museum of Natural Science created this resource as part of an online workshop series, but you are welcome to use or modify it for your classroom. It includes a video and written directions for creating nature journals and tips for incorporating them into your classroom. For information on taking any the Nature Neighborhood online workshops for CEUs or EE credit, visit: https://naturalsciences.org/learn/educators/online-workshops.

In this lesson, students test a variety of insulators and relate their knowledge to energy conservation. With teacher guidance, students design their own investigation. After all experiments are completed, the class looks across the data and draws evidence-based conclusions.

Assess students' understanding of scientific inquiry including the following skills: observation, background research, scientific procedures (including investigation design, measurement techniques, and error analysis), data collection, data display, scientific questions, formulating an hypothesis. Students will design and carry out an investigation to test which material is the best insulator; they will predict which way heat energy will flow in a system and analyze the flow of energy in a system from one point to another and from one form to another.

In this lesson, students research the various types of clouds using print and online materials. Then students write haikus using the Haiku App or the Haiku Poem Interactive, but they do not include the names of the clouds. The students share their haikus and guess what type of cloud each haiku describes.

In this lesson using Ben’s Dream, a picture book by Chris Van Allsburg, students highlight ten major landmarks of the world: the Statue of Liberty, Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Parthenon, the Sphinx, St. Basil’s Cathedral, the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, and Mount Rushmore. After reading and discussing Ben’s Dream, students identify the landmarks shown in the book and examine photographs of them. Working in small groups, students select one landmark to research. Using their research skills, students locate these famous landmarks, conduct further research on them, publish their findings using an online tool, and share that information with the class.

The NC Kids' Exploration Journals are a fun educational tool to help youth explore their communities and natural surroundings! Each journal contains: 18 multidisciplinary activities with guided prompts, 6 lined journal pages for recording observations and reflections, and 4 blank pages for individual creativity.

The digital versions of the journal are designed to be printed out for students either as individual activities or in its entirety so that they can explore their school yard, local park, or own backyard. Though designed for 1st - 5th-graders, older audiences may enjoy them too! They are also available in both English and Spanish languages.

While supplies last, hard copies of the journals are currently available for free to teachers by contacting karen.ipock@ncdcr.gov.

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. 

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.