What your year 5 child needs to know

by E.D. Hirsch Jr., Robert Whelan (Editor), Tanya Lubicz-Nawrocka (Editor)

Designed for parents, teachers and home educators to use with children, this fifth volume in the Core Knowledge UK series presents the specific and shared knowledge that should be at the core of a challenging Year 5 education, Familiar and favourite poems - old and new - from Tennyson's 'The Lady of Shalott' to Roger McGough's 'Sky in the Pie'. Literature from around the world - folk tales from Ethiopia and China, Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as well as extracts from great classics of Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels and Treasure Island. Learning about language - learn the basic building blocks of written English, such as sentence structure, parts of speech and punctuation, as well as writing and research, all explained with a touch of humour. Geography - learn to read maps, explore the geography of several regions of the UK and sail to the South Seas with Captain Cook. British history - explore British history from the Act of Union to the abolition of slavery, through the Georgian era that included the American War of Independence, the French Revolution and the battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo. Visual arts - see how artists have expressed themselves through styles as different as rococo and modernism, whilst learning what the choice of different styles implies in terms of painting, architecture and furniture. Music - become familiar with elements of basic music theory, great composers, instruments and fun songs to sing including 'The Skye Boat Song', 'Heart of Oak' and 'The British Grenadier', as well as modern songs like 'With a Little Help From My Friends'. Mathematics - develop a knack for solving challenging problems including counting with negative numbers, addition and subtraction of fractions and decimals, multiplication and division with decimals, geometry and measurement problems. Science - learn about the workings of the human body, atoms and molecules, electricity, geology and meteorology, including hands-on activities and stories about famous scientists.

350 pages, Paperback

First published October 14, 2013

About the author

E. D. Hirsch, Jr. is the founder and chairman of the Core Knowledge Foundation and professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia. He is the author of several acclaimed books on education in which he has persisted as a voice of reason making the case for equality of educational opportunity.

A highly regarded literary critic and professor of English earlier in his career, Dr. Hirsch recalls being “shocked into education reform” while doing research on written composition at a pair of colleges in Virginia. During these studies he observed that a student’s ability to comprehend a passage was determined in part by the relative readability of the text, but even more by the student’s background knowledge.

This research led Dr. Hirsch to develop his concept of cultural literacy—the idea that reading comprehension requires not just formal decoding skills but also wide-ranging background knowledge. In 1986 he founded the Core Knowledge Foundation. A year later he published Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, which remained at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for more than six months. His subsequent books include The Schools We Need, The Knowledge Deficit, The Making of Americans, and most recently, How to Educate a Citizen: The Power of Shared Knowledge to Unify a Nation.

In How to Educate a Citizen (September, 2020), E.D. Hirsch continues the conversation he began thirty years ago with his classic bestseller Cultural Literacy, urging America’s public schools, particularly in Preschool – Grade 8, to educate our children using common, coherent and sequenced curricula to help heal and preserve the nation.