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December 2nd, 2024 | January 6th, 2025 | February 3rd, 2025 | March 3rd, 2025 | March 24th, 2025 | May 5th, 2025

2024 - 2025 Class 5 Main Lesson

in order to begin Class 5 in the fall, the student must have turned 10 by May 1st of that year.

For Class 5, class size is no more than 14 students, allowing the teacher to get to know each student and creating a school-family environment during class.

The Fifth-Grade year is often referred to as the Golden Age of childhood. The ten and eleven year-old child is perfectly balanced between childhood and adolescence. With increased physical stamina and coordination, increased cognitive abilities, and increased conscience and personal responsibility, the Fifth Grade student is capable of powerful comprehension and expression in their work.

The Fifth Grader has a new awareness of self as they begin to ask themselves questions like “What is my purpose in life?” and “How do I interact with others and with the world?” The Fifth-Grade curriculum meets their increased confidence, maturity, and abilities by exploring how cultures of the world grappled with these same questions. Students of this age are ready to move beyond themselves and out into the world.

History and Geography

Students in Class 5 are ready to move from mythology to formal history studies and follow the history of humanity with the study of ancient cultures from India, Persia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Greece. The lives of Manu, Rama & Sita, Buddha, Zarathustra, Gilgamesh, Socrates, and Alexander the Great are studied among others. At Lotus & Ivy, we are putting effort into diversifying our curriculum so that everyone is represented in our stories and lessons, so we are finding incredible female figures and other ancient cultures to weave into the traditional curriculum.

The study of history begins in ancient times and works up to the present day from Classes 5 through 8. This evolution of humanity over the course of history reflects the developmental growth of the child through these years and meets them right where they are — asking the existential questions like the people of ancient times in 5th Grade, needing the lawfulness like the Romans in 6th Grade, venturing out like the Explorers in Seventh Grade, and desiring to be part of something bigger (revolutions) with an understanding of recent history in Eighth Grade.

In Geography, students expand out from Geography of the United States in Class 4 to the Geography of Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean. Geography brings the child into the world by starting locally and expanding to the whole planet over the next four years.

Language Arts

Literature includes ancient stories such as Gilgamesh, Rama & Sita, and Greek Mythology as well as novel studies. Novels include Gilgamesh the Hero by Geraldine McCaughrean, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin, A Children’s Homer by Padric Collum, and Pandora of Athens by Barry Denenberg. The students are instructed and supported through various written compositions to accompany their history studies. Grammar and spelling practice are incorporated into every main lesson as part of the morning warm-up, and composition is part of every main lesson block whether it be through essay-writing, paragraph writing, creative writing, journaling, or lab reports. For more language arts skills practice, we recommend our Class 5 Language Arts class which meets once a week with Ms. Rezelle.

Science

In Science, Class 5 students study the Plant Kingdom with botany, and many science topics are woven into the history lessons. Some examples include: the study of Manu and the flood is a great time to review the water cycle and look at the rainbow and how colors come into being. The Egyptian method of bringing the floodwaters of the Nile to the crops makes for a perfect engineering project building a shadoof, and the study of the ancient environments lends to the study of climates of the world. The study of the regions of India lends to the study of the diversity of animals in the country, from the snow leopard of the Himalayas to the lions and tigers of the southern forests. (Yes, India is the only country where both lions and tigers live in the wild!)

Math

The Class 5 Math Main Lessons are Geometry I and Decimals. In Geometry I, we introduce geometry concepts and terms in an arts-infused way. Geometry of circles, triangles, and other polygons are explored while we lead students through hands-on discovery activities to find mathematical truths, for example, that all angles in a triangle sum to 180 degrees or that a 3-4-5 triangle is a right triangle, but a 3-4-7 triangle is not. During these Main Lessons, topics such as freehand Geometry, geometric terminology, angles, area and perimeter, the four processes with decimals, equivalences, the metric system, divisibility rules, prime numbers, and much more are studied. Formulas are never given blindly, rather, students are given time to explore and discover during math work.

For a complete math curriculum, Lotus & Ivy recommends Class 5 Math Class, which meets two or three times a week (2 class options), in addition to the Main Lesson Classes, and provides a complete year math curriculum covering topics including a review of fractions, common and unlike denominators, distance, weight, and volume, U.S. measurement system, angles, Pythagorean Theorem, powers of two, and more.

EXPECTATIONS

Our teachers send home assignments for the week for students to work on outside of class time. Class 5 students can expect to spend 2-4 hours outside of class time on assignments each week.

Our classes are recorded and can be watched later for students who miss a class. The recordings are not sold or shared with anyone outside of the class.

Complete Curriculum

Lotus & Ivy’s Main Lessons and homework, when completed, fulfill a complete year homeschool requirement for language arts, science, and social studies. For a complete math curriculum, we recommend that families supplement with additional math practice at least three times a week. Lotus & Ivy offers additional math classes to meet this requirement. For more information about our Class 5 math class, click here.

If you are looking for a complete wholistic program, Lotus & Ivy offers Complement classes in addition to our main lesson and math classes. Our Complements include language arts, Spanish, German, recorder, form drawing, practical arts, and handwork. Students meet once a week with their teacher for these classes in addition to main lesson and math.

Students may enroll in Lotus & Ivy Main Lesson Classes, Math Classes, Language Arts Class, or Complement Classes or any combination of the 3. Lotus & Ivy recommends that students take all three offerings for the most comprehensive experience, providing hands-on and experiential learning at its best.

SCREEN TIME: HARMFUL OR HEALTHY?

We have carefully considered screen time for all of our classes to ensure the screen time is interactive, not passive or one-sided. Our teachers, along with other health & education experts, have for many years encouraged parents to avoid screens for children because, when the screen time is one-sided, like with television and video games, it is harmful to the child’s brain. Live and interactive online classes make good use of technology and allow us to bring this whole-child education to a much larger audience by ensuring that screen time is two-sided and teachers may respond in real-time to the child.

COGNITIVE FOUNDATION

True to our curriculum, our classes provide plenty of opportunities for artistic and creative work.

According to an article published by the Waldorf Research Institute entitled Waldorf Education is Developmentally Appropriate – What Exactly Does this Mean?, “recent MRI equipment has illuminated the fact that in young children, artistic work, full body playing, and sensory stimulation all light up the whole brain. Focused academic work, on the other hand, only lights up small parts of the brain. That ‘lighting’ up points to the development of neurons, making the child’s brain replete with neurons which end up looking, at their best, like a gorgeous, mature tree crown. Once myelinated, these neurons communicate for clear thinking, flexible problem solving, executive function, and creativity.”  (https://www.waldorflibrary.org/articles/1249-waldorf-education-is-developmentally-appropriate-what-exactly-does-this-mean)