5th Grade Historical Literacy Curriculum outlines the content of social-studies integrated units taught within the readers' and writers' workshop framework and taught daily for 90 minutes. Each six week unit contains standards, teaching points, vocabulary, and assessments. Readers' and writers' workshop naturally differentiates for all learners. By June of 2020, each unit will have a slide deck associated with it that contains the teaching points, integrated grammar work, vocabulary, and strategies for partner practice. Our district places careful emphasis on vocabulary, as we have a high percentage of English Language Learners.

In this activity, students will compare their lives on Earth with a virtual experience on Mars. They will begin by using their five senses (sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste) to illustrate and describe various aspects of their lives on Earth. After similarly describing their virtual time on Mars, they will consider the biggest similarities and differences between their “time” on the two planets. They will then create a newspaper article or news report script that strives to help their audience understand what life is like in this deep-space colony.

In this eight-week module, students learn about new or improved technologies that have been developed to meet societal needs and how those inventions have changed people’s lives. They conduct authentic research to build their own knowledge and teach others through writing. In Unit 1, students read the graphic novel Investigating the Scientific Method with Max Axiom, Super Scientist by Donald B. Lemke as well as several informational articles about inventions that have been developed to meet people’s needs. Students learn about and analyze structures and visual elements authors use to convey complex ideas. Then, they will write a short opinion paragraph about which of the inventions they learned about has been most important to people and why. In Unit 2, students will read The Boy Who Invented TV: The Story of Philo Farnsworth by Kathleen Krull, focusing on how the television was invented to meet societal needs.

Find the rest of the EngageNY ELA resources at https://archive.org/details/engageny-ela-archive .

This is a lesson for tropical rainforests that fits best for third- through fifth-grade students. There are multiple reading and writing strategies implemented within the lesson. Throughout the lessons, there will be opportunities to build upon prior knowledge, write, draw, and listen to sound effects of the rainforest. Students will use graphic organizers and websites to aid in the understanding and learning of rainforests. There are also extension lessons for students to create a list of questions in small groups to research. Throughout these lessons the students will be exposed to multiple media sources.