5th Grade

PE and Athletics

As a Physical Education Department, our focus is to incorporate a wide range of motor and cognitive skills and a strong foundation of sports game rules and strategies. For example, in the fall of each year, our boys take part in a soccer unit that develops their passing and receiving skills and their ability to construct an offensive and defensive strategy during lead-up and modified games.

Music / Performing Arts

5th-grade classroom music concentrates on self-expression with a focus on the Blues. Boys may choose to take instrumental lessons, sing in the 5th/6th Chorus, play in the 5th/6th Grade String or Wind Ensemble, and participate in our annual musical theater production.

Theatre

For their first year in the Upper Division, fifth-grade students are now ready to audition for our biggest production of the year: the winter musical. They will perform alongside boys in the entire Upper Division and work on either our beloved tradition of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas or our brand-new tradition of famous Broadway songs: Boys, Broadway, & Beyond.

Visual Arts

Students develop their skills in drawing from observation through a contemporary understanding of identity through portraiture. In Woodshop, boys focus on integrating aspects of science, technology, engineering, art, and math into their design process.

Homeroom / Advisory / SEL

Fifth-grade boys continue to explore and develop their social-emotional skills and work on developing a growth mindset along with the executive functioning skills of organization, future-planning, and self-advocacy.

Writing

Boys produce new or original work that draws connections between concepts and explains ideas across a variety of representations, developing narrative, opinions, and informative texts which embody clear and concise paragraph organization and structure, appropriate usage of punctuation, and grammar for the proper audience and its purpose.

Reading / English

Boys read fiction and nonfiction texts to build understanding of literary traits, develop text-based responses, and analyze ways that authors use texts to connect literary elements to build a story and explore themes.

Library

Fifth-grade boys participate in a year-long course that combines reading promotion and digital citizenship, as well as the research skills that are foundational to assignments in the Upper Division.

Mathematics

Fifth graders master fraction and decimal operations. They explore number properties and extend their understanding of decimal place value to solve word problems encompassing a variety of concepts, including measurement and plane geometry.

Science & Engineering

Fifth graders create prototypes that address current pollution challenges in the Hudson Raritan Estuary. They also participate in the Billion Oyster Project by collecting data on the A-S oysters housed along the East 90th Street Ferry Landing.

Social Studies / History

Boys in Fifth Grade will examine and group artifacts, primary and secondary sources, and field sites as they extend on understandings of the Western Hemisphere’s First Peoples, Mesoamerican civilizations, and Native cultures.

Spanish

By Grade Five, boys begin to focus more on interpersonal speaking and the art of conversation. Skills such as active listening and responding are rehearsed in the target language, as students become stronger at reading body language, gestures, posture, and tone.
 

Technology & Digital Fluency

Students learn to become effective and efficient communicators using technology for word processing, visual aids, and organizational tools.

Boys may elect to participate in a wide selection of electives to explore and further develop their interests in programming, digital arts, and physical computing.