What Your Fifth Grader Needs to Know: Fundamentals of a Good Fifth-grade Education

Building on themes and topics from earlier volumes in the Core Knowledge Series, some of the things you will find in this volume include stories and speeches: selections from Homer's epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Don Quixote, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address; American Civilization: progress and problems with industrialization, reformers who worked for rights of women, African-Americans, and the urban poor, and the complexities and compromises of becoming an international power; life sciences: classifying living organisms and life cycles and reproduction of plants and animals; geography: climate zones and time zones and how lakes are formed; physical sciences: combining concepts of science and math such as mass, speed, force, and energy; and world civilizations: European and Native American cultures meet, the European Renaissance, feudal Japan and Russia, the tremendous religious upheavals of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, and the massive political and social shake-up of the French Revolution.