English Language Arts

About this course

Fifth grade is the year the mechanics get finished and essay writing begins. Grammar goes past naming parts of speech into the things that actually improve writing: pronoun-antecedent agreement, verb tense consistency, dangling and misplaced modifiers, active versus passive voice, and sentence variety. A separate ten-lesson punctuation unit covers commas in series and clauses, semicolons and colons, apostrophes, quotation marks in dialogue, hyphens and dashes, parentheses and brackets, ellipses, and how to punctuate titles, at a level of detail most curricula postpone. Sentence structure covers all four sentence types through compound-complex, plus parallel structure and sentence combining. Composition then builds in stages across four units: the paragraph (unity, coherence, transitions, four modes), the five-paragraph essay with the full writing process, narrative writing (conflict, mood, point of view, sensory detail, show-don't-tell), and research writing (reliable sources, paraphrasing, avoiding plagiarism, citations). Rounding out the year are units on poetry (meter, imagery, free verse, haiku, acrostic, and the Psalms), literature analysis, and oral communication including interviewing and respectful debate.

The course is 258 lessons across 15 units, and three of those units are long-running weekly sequences rather than short topical ones. Spelling runs in pairs for 36 weeks: a study lesson with twelve words in a table giving the meaning and an example sentence for each, plus a look-say-cover-write-check routine, then a matching quiz lesson where a button speaks the word aloud and your student types it into a sentence, so that half needs working audio. Themes progress from silent letters and -ough patterns through prefixes, suffixes, Latin and Greek roots, commonly confused words, and academic vocabulary for science, history, and math. A typical instructional lesson runs about 45 minutes and is 400 to 600 words of explanation written directly to your student, heavy on worked examples and correct-versus-incorrect pairs, with a KJV verse used as the example sentence more often than as decoration. Every lesson ends with a ten-question quiz that grades itself.

The distinctive part of this grade is the 60-lesson Reading Passages unit. Each passage is a self-contained 300-to-400-word text with its own comprehension quiz, and they fall into five groups: 18 Bible narratives running from Elijah through the Resurrection, 12 Christian biographies (Tyndale, Bunyan, Whitefield, Wesley, Livingstone, Harriet Tubman, Eric Liddell, Corrie ten Boom, Jim Elliot, Billy Graham, Elisabeth Elliot, Brother Andrew), 12 American history passages from the Mayflower Compact to the Civil Rights Movement, 10 science passages on topics such as the water cycle, photosynthesis, plate tectonics, and the human heart, and 8 short original character stories about honesty, generosity, courage, and forgiveness. That unit alone gives you a year of reading practice across genres. Coming in, your student should read multi-paragraph text comfortably and write a solid paragraph without help. The lessons are written to be worked independently, with you reviewing the essays and stories that come out of the writing units.

What the course covers

• Advanced grammar: modifiers, voice, agreement, and tense consistency
• Full punctuation and mechanics, including semicolons, colons, and dashes
• Simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences
• Paragraph unity, coherence, and transitional phrases
• The five-paragraph essay and the writing process
• Narrative craft: conflict, mood, dialogue, and sensory detail
• Research writing, paraphrasing, plagiarism, and citations
• Poetry: meter, imagery, free verse, haiku, acrostic, and Psalms
• 60 reading passages: Bible, biography, American history, science, character
• 36 weeks of spelling word lists paired with typed quizzes

What your student will be able to do

• Rewrite passive sentences in active voice and fix misplaced modifiers
• Punctuate dialogue, lists, and complex series correctly
• Plan and write a five-paragraph essay with a clear thesis
• Read a nonfiction passage and summarize it accurately in a few sentences
• Research a topic, paraphrase sources honestly, and cite them
• Speak and present clearly, and disagree with someone respectfully

Scope and sequence

All 15 units of English Language Arts for Grade 5, in the order they are taught.

Every lesson, by title

All 258 lesson titles are listed here — nothing is withheld until you download. Open a unit to read its contents.

One whole lesson, exactly as it comes

This is a real lesson taken from the middle of the course — the teaching text, the practice, the homework, and the first three quiz questions with their answers. It is not a marketing excerpt.

What you will need

Drawn from the materials named across all 258 lessons of this course. Most families already own most of it.