Math Standards for the Fifth Grade in Idaho

Idaho fifth-graders learn math skills that will help them in the "real world."

Although states oversee their own schools, federal legislation such as No Child Left behind has emphasized the need for each state to create student learning standards and assess students' progress in meeting those standards. State standards and assessments are designed to outline and measure students' basic and advanced skills. Idaho's standards, for example, specify different levels of thinking from memorization to critical thinking. Fifth-grade math standards emphasize accurate performance -- a step up from memorizing facts and skills, but cognitively not yet approaching and understanding of how or why those skills work.

Standard One

The first math standard in Idaho relates to numbers and operations -- the basics of math. Students should be able to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. In fifth grade, the basic math facts have been mastered, and those skills are now being applied to fractions and decimals. Students learn how to put fractions in numerical order -- more complicated than "one, two, three." In fifth grade there is also an emphasis on more complex multiplication and division -- two-, three-, even four-digit numbers. Long division is one example of the work kids might be asked to do.

Standard Two

Measurement is the focus of Standard Two in Idaho. Students work in many different areas of measurement such as length, volume, temperature and even telling time. When someone refers to "the last decade," do students know what that means? In fifth grade, these types of concepts are covered. These are practical skills that will carry far into the future; many real-world problems are presented to kids. For example, students will learn to convert inches into metric measurements and how to tell time to the nearest second, using the tools these skills require, such as rulers and clocks.

Standard Three

Though many adults think of algebra as a high school or college class, those skills begin to emerge in upper elementary school. They are the focus for Idaho's third standard in fifth grade. Students should be able to read "greater than" or "less than" expressions using the mathematical symbols. They can also begin to solve algebraic questions: if two plus "x" equals five, students can use their knowledge of fact families to determine that "x" is three. At this point, reading and writing skills are a bit more advanced, so students are expected to take word problems and express them numerically (and vice versa).

Standard Four

Shapes, lines and angles are the focus of standard four: geometry. Students are expected to identify more complicated shapes such as hexagons and parallelograms and be able to describe them in terms of their sides and angles. This standard is heavy on vocabulary that may boggle kids' minds: congruent, parallel, ray, circumference. Students will need to learn these terms and be able to describe and/or produce shapes, lines and angles that meet those definitions.

Standard Five

The last standard in Idaho relates to statistics and probability. In fifth grade, these are emerging skills that center mostly on reading graphs and charts, then applying those skills to the creation of their own graphs and charts. Averaging numbers is also a skill used at this grade level, not to mention knowing the different types of averages -- mean, median, mode.

References

• Idaho State Department of Education -- Math Standards