5th grade writing examples and expectations.

[Btervet]

I would love some insight on my 5th graders writing. I am currently struggling with knowing what is age appropriate and what is not. When I read these, I just see many flaws and don't know where to start. This year we are using Writing with Skills 1, and also doing weekly summaries of history and science as per the WTM. 

This is an example from WWS, summarizing a section in 2-3 sentences. 

Then 2 examples of history summaries and a science summary. 

[MK2222]

I know this is a months old question at this point, but I have a 5th grader, too.  I thought I would give you a sample of his writing to use as a comparison. I don't know if he is at grade level so I would also love some feedback from someone who is knowledgeable about such things.  Your 5th grader's paragraph about Brownian motion looks awesome to me. It's full of information.

My son types his compositions because he finds that easier than handwriting. This is part of a report he wrote for Core Knowledge Language Arts. The formatting is a little off because I just copied and pasted in plain text.

 

Imagine building a city on top of a swamp with only stone tools. Think you can't do much? The Aztec will prove you wrong. The roads divided cities into districts and bridges crossed swamp water. In the middle of a city, there were palaces and temples on top of pyramids. Some pyramids were larger than the Mayan’s. Outside of the city center there were districts with their own school, farm, and markets. Commoners lived in adobe houses with steam huts. It turns out you can build a lot of stuff with only stone tools.

The Inca Empire's architecture was interesting. They had tunnels through mountains to other cities. They had a network of roads and suspension bridges, and they used a relay messaging system. All of the roads led to Cuzco, the capital city. In Cuzco there were luxury homes for the emperor, they were built with huge bricks with no mortar. The Sacsahuaman fortress is interesting because nobody knows how they built it without wheels. Machu Picchu is a city in the clouds and a place emperors lived and ceremonies were held. All of these houses were for the emperor but what did the ordinary people live in? The commoner homes had few windows and were a one room rectangular hut made of adobe. The Inca only had simple tools and had no wheels but they created all of this.