Grade Five California Standards

If you take the text of the California Content Standards for 5th grade English, Math, History, and Science, remove stop words (including “student” and “grade” and “five” in this case), count the occurrences of each word, scale the size by frequency, then lay them out somewhat randomly from the center, this is what you get:

“War” appears 8 times, “water” 15, “listening” 7. I’m just as wary as anyone of ascribing too much meaning to a shallow analysis like this, but the graphic does provide another interesting lens into what’s expected from 5th graders — the target market for the video games my junior class will be making this semester.