5th Grade Civil War Unit

As I always do when finishing a new unit, I will post the content here as a post within the main pages of my blog. Unit 5: The American Civil War, which includes topics on slavery, the war, two nations, Abraham Lincoln, and reconstruction, exists as a page that is called Fifth Grade Civil War Unit. It is also listed in my subject listing under Social Studies. For those of you who like to get what you came for, you can find that entire post in its entirety listed below:

My fifth grade unit on the Civil War attempts to take students through the topics of slavery, including the roots of slavery, horrors of slavery, and the Underground Railroad. From there, we talk about the political beginnings of the Civil War, and spend the majority of the unit in a timeline taking us through the major battles, important people and events, and ending with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

SLAVERY IN THE CIVIL WAR

I like to start the unit with the portion on slavery. I have two posts in my old literacy blog titled Teaching A Unit on Slavery in Intermediate or Middle School (Part 1: Picture Books), and (Part 2: Literature Selections) that you can refer to for some great ideas. I have a few books that I enjoy reading aloud to the students, and that they learn a lot from.

I always start the unit by reading From Slave Ship to Freedom Road, a Julius Lester book that, while it is a picture book, is definitely hard hitting and doesn't hold back. It's a great way to set the tone for teaching about slavery if you intend to show the horrors and injustices of slavery in a way that will get through to elementary students but won't overwhelm them. (there aren't really any "free" versions of this book out there, but it's definitely worth the $6 or so that you'll spend getting it on Amazon or through one of the links on Google shopping).

I also read Under the Quilt of Night by Deborah Hopkinson. This story is a great, appropriate for almost any age telling of a family on the run on the Underground Railroad. This book is available in my schools library, and might be available in yours too, it's a common book (it's in the easy section). Finally, I read Almost to Freedom by Vonda Micheaux Nelson, it's a great story of a runaway girl and her family told from the perspective of the little girls doll. This book actually stuck with many of my students more than the others for some reason.

Now, granted, the topic of slavery is deserving of its own unit, and I will eventually get there. I always expand on this unit when we get to the civil right era. I've found that my students in 5th grade seem to understand the complexity and importance of slavery in the United States when I pair it up with the civil right era. Because honestly, more than half the class always thinks that Martin Luther King Jr. ended slavery before I teach them differently. I'm going to list a few of the more high quality resources about slavery here, that you can use as part of a Civil War unit, it's own unit, or like me, a mixture of Civil War and Civil Rights.

• The Underground Railroad Interactive on Scholastic.com: A high quality interactive that takes students through an escape, full with characters and a telling of events. There are passages to read or have read aloud on the computer. 
• Pathways to Freedom: Maryland and the Underground Railroad: This neat little interactive is highly educational and plays out a little like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books. It's well done and very educational. 
• The Listing of Slavery and Civil Rights Resources Available on PBS: It is what it says, there's stuff here on the slave trade, Jim Crow, Civil Rights, and more. 
• Timeline of Slavery Throughout World History: This is helpful if you wish to discuss the overall scope of slavery, dating back all the way to 6800 BC.
• Map of American Slavery at NY Times: A great little map with some specific areas to focus research on. 

Now, let's move on to the Civil War itself. In my class, I want students to understand the causes of the Civil War, the difference between the Confederate Army and Union Army, the basic timeline of events, and how the world recovered afterwards. With that being said, let's move on to some great resources:

THE CIVIL WAR

• American Civil War Resources: A listing with online quizzes and games. There's another listing of great resources at surfnetkids. 
• The Civil War for 5th Graders: A great little site done by a teacher. It plays out kind of like a web quest, with some good, kid friendly information presented in an easy to understand format. 
• History Channel Civil War Interactive: You can always count on the History Channel to have great interactives of the highest quality. I'm using this one as students learn more about the differences between the two armies, battles, etc. It's all here, and it's well done. 
• NY Times Civil War Interactives: There's a few great resources here, some about the war, some about life during the Civil War, and some about Lincoln. 
• Battle Casualties Map: Hosted by the Washington Post, it's a great map that shows casualties on a map in a timeline format. 

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

• Abraham Lincoln's Life Timeline: Hosted by Lincoln's Library and Museum. PBS also has a great Lincoln Timeline. 
• Abraham Lincoln's Crossroads: A challenging game about Lincoln's presidency that would be great for your highly intelligent students desiring a challenge. 
• Lincoln's Major Speeches: If you're going to teach about his inaugural speeches, or the Gettysburg Address. 
• History.com Interactive on Lincoln's Assassination: Good stuff!
• The Lincoln Memorial: The listing for the Lincoln Memorial on the National Park website, there's a few great panoramas and discussions of Lincoln's importance. 

Finally, as we go through the unit, I have students complete a 6 part "history web," a little project that I will post more on as we finish them up this week. It's a great small project.

I will also have my students complete a "gallery walk," an idea I took from Lessons With Laughter. I will also amend this posting with more information on that when it's completed. 

5th Grade Math Unit 2: Place Value From Billions to Thousandths, Notations, Comparing, Ordering, Adding, and Subtracting Decimals

I recently finished and posted to my static pages Math Unit 2: Place Value, Notations, and Decimals. This unit is part of my years worth of math units, which can also be accessed from my Math 9 Week Plans page.

In the spirit of convenience, I will also include the exact text of this unit here as a post in the main posts page of my blog. I hope that you can find this helpful:



5th grade Math Unit 2 involves place value from thousandths to billions, comparing and ordering numbers from thousandths to billions, and finally, adding and subtracting decimals.

The all encompassing, end of unit assessment can be downloaded in .doc format HERE to get you started.

These concepts are important to future success in math, and are taught in three parts so that the concepts scaffold onto one another as we go. This unit comes after a large numbers and operations unit that we started the year with, one in which students identified factors and multiples, worked with prime factorization, and finally refined skills in multiplication and division.

The unit is split into its three parts here, with all necessary exams and paperwork attached:

Unit 2.1: PLACE VALUE FROM THOUSANDTHS TO BILLIONS

It's important that students have an understanding of very large and very small numbers in the 5th grade. So we start by working on place value. Place value is a good place to start because it comes down to practice, repetition, and memorization of the place values.

The PDSA that accompanies unit 2.1 can be downloaded HERE.
The Unit 2.1 Assessment can be downloaded HERE. (I should mention right here that most of the assessments I have are also available in Spanish. Just let me know if you're interested).

By applying backwards design to this portion of Unit 2, the assessment shows a need for knowledge in: expanded notation, written notation, standard notation, and place value.

Activities to meet these needs are listed below:

First, I highly recommend a great activity called Place Value Cups. I originally came across this activity on a blog titled Look+Listen=Learn. By making these cups, students are given multiple opportunities to practice place value and expanded notation at the same time. It's a great activity, and I'm excited to see the difference it can make with students who struggle with this concept.

Teaching place value and the different notations is actually quite different than a lot of mathematical concepts. By this age, it should be more refinement and scaffolding than outright teaching. Let's be honest, if a child reaches 5th grade and has no understanding of place value, they've probably never been instructed before, or had some flat out awful teachers in the past, because it's integral to 3rd and 4th grades. I've found that students benefit more from practice practice practice than anything else. So while using the place value cups, I also refine the concept of how to say numbers.

Saying numbers aloud, especially larger numbers and numbers with decimals in them, can be daunting for the struggling math student. When I say "saying numbers aloud," I'm also teaching expanded notation. I like to rely on comma naming to give students a chance to know how to say numbers possibly before they conceptually understand big numbers (millions and beyond).

I teach students that the first comma is called thousand, the second is called million, and the third is called billion. We practice this in class. Then, we practice saying numbers with comma names. The great thing about this is that students never have to actually say a number larger than hundreds. Here's an example:

324,783,013.... The student would first say three hundred twenty four. This is simple, it's a concept that has been mastered by the vast majority of 5th graders years ago. Then it's a matter of naming that comma. It's the third comma we're looking at, and its name is billion. So, three hundred twenty four billion... Then the student would continue on... seven hundred eighty three, this time it's the second comma, million... seven hundred eighty three mission... thirteen. And that's the end of that. It really helps students understand and be able to say numbers, which we then build on with expanded notation. Expanded notation is fairly straight forward. It will also be covered in the resources below:

Here's a few resources to get you started:

• Place Value Charts at Adrian Bruce's Math Stuff: I will be printing off the charts and hanging them up in the classroom to use as an example. They go up to quadrillions. I only need up through billions.
• A simple, colorful chart to help with place value and expanded notation: PDF document.
• Numerous worksheets from MathAids.com.
• A chart to help students write numbers and understand their place values.
• A pdf packet of worksheets on the subject. I especially like page 10.

Unit 2.2: COMPARING AND ORDERING DECIMALS

After we have taught place value to thousandths (and billions), we move on to ordering decimals, and comparing decimals with <,>,= statements.

The PDSA for Unit 2.2 can be accessed HERE.
The assessment for Unit 2.2 can be accessed HERE.

By using the same method of backwards design, starting with the 2.2 assessment, we see that in this particular cycle of the lesson, students will be learning how to apply less than, greater than, and equal to statements to decimals, and will learn how to order large numbers with decimals (and simply large numbers is also acceptable here) either from greatest to least or least to greatest. Finally, it's important to apply these skills to word problems. So here we go:

• Head off to Khan Academy for his lesson on Comparing Decimals. Khan Academy is great, because he teaches through video, and offers various practice problem sets. Plus, he's got TONS of stuff.
• Fruit Shoot Comparing Decimals Game: An interactive game for students to play.
• I like for my students to practice ordering numbers on hanging number lines. It's a simple concept involving string and folded pieces of paper (or note cards). 

• This document, titled Gap Closing, has some great activities to fit this unit of study, particularly comparing and ordering decimals. 
• This pdf document includes a small chart I have my students make so they can begin to understand conceptually how and why they compare numbers, and what it actually means, in terms of place value, when one number is larger than another.
• Finally, a refresher on inequality symbols (if your students don't know this, they need to know this!)

UNIT 2.3: ADDING AND SUBTRACTING DECIMALS

Finally we end this unit with a cycle on adding and subtracting decimals. The concept is straight forward, and quite simply involves lining up the numbers to be added or subtracted by the decimal point.

The PDSA for cycle Unit 2.3 can be downloaded HERE.
The Unit 2.3 assessment can be downloaded HERE. If you like to save time, as my grade level team does, we don't use this assessment, instead, we simply score the final page (the adding and subtracting decimals page) twice, once as part of the unit score, and once for a unit 2.3 score.

• Here is a nice visual from Cool Math.com that pretty much explains it all. 
• Enchanted Learning also has a page about adding decimals, with some fun pdf worksheet games to go with it.
• My favorite worksheet building site, Worksheet Works, has pages of fully customizable and downloadable (in pdf) addition and subtraction of decimals worksheets.

Just remember, the concept of adding and subtracting decimals is quite simple. It all comes down to lining up the decimal, regardless of how huge one number might be and how small the other might be. Your students also might think about using zeros as placeholders when doing this!

5th Grade Math Unit 1: Factors, Multiples, 2x2 Multiplication, 3x2 Division

As I've evolved my thinking on this blog a little in the five weeks I've been at it, I've started to change my own purposes for doing it. As I planned out math Unit 1 (which will be starting up for us here in just a little over two weeks), I started to think about the resources that I use year after year. So, I decided to include the PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act) files, as well as all the exams we utilize in the unit.

This units is housed in one of my subject specific static pages (the math 9-week plans page), in a page titled 5th Grade Factors, Multiples, Multiplication, and Division Unit, but I will include the text of that page verbatim below. Thanks for viewing, I hope this is of some help:




This is a big moment in the short history of this blog. I finally was able to get my computers set up in my classroom, and download all of my PDSA files and math tests that are already put together. As always, I will provide you with these for free. If you'd like more information on PDSA, see my page titled What is PDSA?

Math instruction for Unit 1 is divided into three portions, factors & multiples, multiplication, and division. Each section has a test, except for the final section (in this case, division). To save time, we always include the last section on the unit final exam. My goal here is to provide you with the necessary documents, and some resources as well. I work with my colleagues to make the exams, and plan our instruction backwards from there. The backwards design approach ensures that we are teaching what needs to be taught in the most efficient manner possible. Let's get started:

Factors & Multiples

The factors & multiples unit is set by the PDSA for that cycle, and was planned using backwards design, beginning with the Unit 1.1 Factors & Multiples Exam. It is set to take 10 days to teach, with one day at the end for testing and discussion. When viewing the exam, you will see that the main concepts to be taught are factors, multiples, prime numbers, composite numbers, square numbers, and prime factorization. What follows are resources and ideas for teaching each concept:

• My blog already includes a post and a static page about factors & multiples. I don't want to completely re-hash those here, but there are five different computer based resources available there.
• Factor Trees: I start right from the beginning of the year teaching with factor trees. Here are some great factor tree resources:
• A short and simple pdf document explaining what factor trees are. 
• Factor Tree Worksheet Builder: A good tool to make your own printable worksheets. You can customize the level of difficulty before making a pdf that you can save and/or print.
• Math Lines at Cool Math: I love played Zuma on Xbox Live (I'm kind of a video game nerd). This is Zuma with a twist. You can select a number, it defaults to 12. You have to shoot balls into other balls to make the product of the numbers 12. Very fun, good math practice.

Multiplication

Allow me to be a little more precise. This section of the unit on multiplication is 2x2 digit multiplication, as you can see in the PDSA file. Again, instruction was planned beginning with the Unit 1.2 Two by Two Digit Multiplication Exam. We have 7 days plus 1 day for testing to teach this portion of the unit. Here are resources for this section:

• Here are links to two sections on the great Worksheet Works worksheet building tool (see my post on this tool HERE). First there is a nice page with many options for teachers called Multi-Digit Multiplication Skills. I LOVE the variety of options available here. For your students who may be struggling with the standard algorithm, they also have Lattice and Grid worksheets. And before I forget, they have 2x2 digit multiplication word problems as well. 
• My school uses FASTT Math (a computer tool purchased from Scholastic, kids enjoy learning multiplication facts by playing the games and earning different things). It's not cheap, but fear not, there are free alternatives out there with free teacher tracking. At Math Facts Pro, you can create an account and track student progress as they play simple math games, at Math Trainer, kids can play a neat challenging game with annoying music (that you can turn off), and finally Multiplication.com has some really fun and visually cool games that kids are sure to love. 
• If you need more information on the lattice and grid methods, check out these videos:

LATTICE METHOD

GRID METHOD

Division

To be more specific, we're talking about 3 x 2 division problems. The PDSA will help guide instruction for this 8 days (with 1 day at the end for end of unit testing), as well as the End of Unit 1 Exam (I also have an English only copy), which includes the three by two division problems in it. For our data collection purposes, we collect data for this portion of the unit from the two division problems on the unit 1 exam for calculation in this PDSA cycle, and it also counts towards the end of unit 1 score. This "double dipping" serves us well, because we get the information we want, and do it in a timely, efficient manner. Here are the 5th grade division resources:

• Right back to Worksheet Works for their Multi-Digit Division Skills Worksheets. 
• Kids Numbers Long Division Practice Interactive: The sounds are probably the most annoying thing I've ever heard, but that's easily fixed. It does offer some good practice for kids struggling with their long division.
• Fun 4 the Brain has numerous division games, including Flying High, my favorite of the bunch.
• Finally, I'll let Khan Academy explain the process of long division, using the Divide, Multiply, Subtract, Bring Down method:

My Latest Unit of Resources: World Wars (World War I, Great Depression, World War II)

My most recent update to my units is Social Studies Unit 6: World Wars. This unit includes World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II.

My resources for World War II are much more in depth. You can access that unit by clicking the link or the picture.

Normally, for convenience, I would post the entire text of the unit here so that you don't have to go clicking through my blog. My unit pages were organized the way they are for my own purposes more than anything else. However, in the case of this unit, there are many links, and a few Youtube clips embedded, so it's faster in terms of loading time to just click over to that page.

5th Grade Science Unit on Atoms & Molecules

Underneath my subject static pages here on my blog, I have just completed a science unit on atoms & molecules.

I've been focusing on making sure that these unit pages are full of information that I can use to assist in my own planning, and making sure that it's a service to other teachers. There are links to the content, some activities, many pdf documents that are freely available for printing, and some great videos that I use in this unit. Let me know if you have any other suggestions.

SCIENCE UNIT: ATOMS & MOLECULES

My 5th Grade Unit on Westward Expansion

In my subject specific static pages within this blog, I have posted resources and plans for teaching a unit on Westward Expansion (the frontier, California Gold Rush, the many trails that brought pioneers out West, etc.).

You can access that unit on my blog, it's titled Unit 5: Westward Expansion. It is my hope that there are links here that are useful to other teachers, most of this stuff is appropriate for grades 2-7 with adaptations. There are many links for kids, and teachers, including lots of print ready pdf documents. Everything is free, so that's always a plus!

I have also taken the exact page and removed all teacher resources from it. When my students begin research in this unit, they will use the page Social Studies Unit 5: Westward Expansion Student Links Only.