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Fifth Grade Core Curriculum Resources

Study in the arts is an essential means---not an end---to acquiring thinking skills, creativity, the ability to change, and the facility to teach oneself. In a safe, nurturing environment, the arts enable students to express their feelings, communicate thoughts, explore their creativity, solve problems, communicate ideas, develop a sense of community, and appreciate themselves as participants in history, tradition, and culture. Learning in art, dance, drama, film, and music advances and strengthens motor skills, promotes considerate behavior, ability to work well with others, self discipline, perception, and sensitivity. Fine Arts experiences contribute to the developmental process of understanding one another and naturally motivate students in all their learning.

The Fine Arts Elementary Core Curriculum incorporates four art forms: Dance, Music, Theatre, and Visual Arts.

 

Dance - Fifth Grade

Children have a natural instinct to move - to jump or leap for joy, roll with laughter, melt with disappointment, or contract with fear. Movement helps them master their world and determine who they are. Their intuitive responses and explorations of movement become the material of the elementary dance core curriculum. Through this curriculum, students transform everyday movement into dance by focusing on the sensory experience. They learn to value themselves and others as unique individuals with the ability to move, create, and respond to ideas, concepts, feelings, and relationships through dance. Children discover that, as unique and creative human beings, the power to find joy and personal connections resides within themselves.

Below are the suggested target understandings and skills for fifth grade dance:

  • Moving - Demonstrate increased body conditioning. Show a combination of locomotor movements with accurate shaping, rhythmic, and spatial clarity. Create a 24 count sequence of locomotor steps and axial movements to include directional and body part changes.

  • Investigating - Explore, in a group, a 16-count rhythm pattern, in and through space, changing floor pattern, and spatial relationships. Create a sequence in and through space using three body parts as focal points. Create a sequence that includes volumes and lines in space. Create a sequence demonstrating energy changes involving body parts, directions and levels.

  • Creating - Explore the movement potential found in an idea, visual image, object, text, sound, or activity. Abstract it to create a motif. Explore the formal properties of choreography using a simple sequence or motif. Create a composition based on the above exploration using the elements and structures of dance. Evaluate a live performance or videotape using dance elements & principles.

  • Connecting - Attend a live concert or observe a guest artist perform ballet, modern dance, or jazz. Discuss how the dance form developed, its style, and role it plays in culture today. Research and learn a dance of the people who have immigrated here and contributed to the rich and differing American historical culture. Create a composition which reflects a current or historical event.

Music - Fifth Grade

Music is the natural extension of the human heartbeat. Emotions are brought to the surface and melted together with thought by its imaginative rhythms and patterns of sound. It makes work and play more enjoyable and provides a way for children to relate to and express their feelings about the events of the day, their friends and family, differences in people, and the mechanical and natural wonders of the world about them. Singing, playing, exploring, creating, and listening to music will help them to recognize and describe its elements, discover its messages, increase their perception of sound, and invent their own musical expressions. They will also gain skills in working together, solving problems, thinking analytically and connecting with other subjects they are learning.

Below are the suggested target understandings and skills for fifth grade music:

  • Singing - Differentiate chest and head voice Control phrasing and articulation.

  • Playing - Simple harmonic instruments (autoharp) Accompaniment of solo or group singing.

  • Creating - Introduce theme and variation in vocal or instrumental music; e.g., have students begin with a familiar song in which they select a phrase or cadence from which they will create a variation of the melody, rhythm, meter, or lyrics. Create simple accompaniment for a familiar folk or traditional song; e.g., select a familiar 2-chord song and create accompaniment rhythm patterns on any harmonic/melodic instruments the students have been working with in class; try playing 2 different instruments together such as recorder & auto harp; try adding one or a few unpitched percussion instruments for texture.

  • Listening - Identify the elements that create texture/harmony. Identify theme and variation. Identify specific metric patterns (time signatures). Identify different vocal timbres/range.

  • Connecting - Select a favorite American patriotic song to teach or share with your class. Visit the library to find a song from the Revolutionary War era or the Civil War era that might still be sung and enjoyed today. Describe how music might have been performed by your ancestors as they came across the ocean on ships (Pilgrim ships or maybe slave ships). Plan a musical celebration of songs and dances that would be appropriate for a patriotic celebration in your school.

Theatre - Fifth Grade

The Drama Core builds a bridge between play and learning. In the years before kindergarten, when blankets thrown over tables became dangerous caves and parents' old clothes grew into brave, new explorers, playing at drama taught us about being human. Beginning with kindergarten, the drama core helps us learn how to work together when we are people in a place with a problem to solve. Walking in the shoes of others helps us understand others and participate successfully in the making of a neighborhood - be it of people next door or people around the world.

Below are the suggested target understandings and skills for third grade theatre:

  • Analyzing - Analyze character function in a novel or play. Analyze character motivation in a novel or play.

  • Practicing - Practice emotional recall – connecting to mood and the given circumstances. Practice transforming a space into a drama world or play setting.

  • Constructing - Construct dramatizations that reveal how character motivation influences action & outcome. Transform the drama space into a play setting using transformational objects. Collaborate to write an original play script.

  • Applying - Compare and contrast character motivation in a novel or play with personal motivation in daily life. Compare and contrast settings found in novels and plays with settings in daily life.

Visual Arts - Fifth Grade

The Visual Arts discipline students to take greater meaning and a refined sense of beauty from the world that surrounds them. The Visual Arts give them practice in decoding the worlds of the past as well as a deeper understanding of and ability to cope with our visual culture with its nonstop parade of images and enticements. The Visual Arts give students time to interpret their own lives and to create objects that carry meaning important to them individually as well as to their generation. It gives them a means to analyze and plan.

Below are the suggested target understandings and skills for fifth grade visual arts:

  • Making Art and Expressing Meaning in Art - Create scenes with distinct foregrounds, middle-grounds, and backgrounds. Add lines that travel along the surface of objects to show their direction and form. Employ the elements and principles of art to express an idea or an event important to the students. Create an abstract work of art. Imitate the surface textures of objects.

  • Appreciating and Decoding Meaning in Art - Compare parts of an object to the whole to improve their skill in displaying proportion in works of art. Balance works of art by evenly distributing elements on either side of its center. Identify and discuss realism and abstraction.