📚 Grade 5 English Language Arts: how to help at home

What each unit covers

1. 🔎Reading Detectives

   Reading original stories, a poem and nonfiction passages, then finding the theme and main idea, making inferences, describing characters, summarizing and working out word meanings.

2. 🎢Plot and Conflict

   The five parts of a plot, types of conflict (person vs. person, nature or self), and telling first-, second- and third-person point of view apart.

3. 📚Read With a Purpose

   Using prior knowledge, choosing varied texts, adjusting reading rate for purpose and checking understanding while reading.

4. 🎨Figurative Language

   Spotting similes, metaphors, personification, hyperbole, onomatopoeia and alliteration, and explaining what common idioms really mean.

5. 🧭Purpose and Structure

   Deciding whether a text informs, persuades or entertains, recognizing five common text structures and their signal words, and using text features like the glossary and index.

6. 🧩Context Clues

   Using the words around an unfamiliar word to figure out what it means, naming the type of clue, and choosing the right meaning of words like “bat” or “bank.”

7. 🌱Greek and Latin Roots

   Learning common Greek and Latin roots (like tele = far, port = carry, rupt = break) and using them to figure out long words such as “spectator” or “interrupt.”

8. 🧩Long Words: Chunk and Spell

   Reading and spelling longer words by finding syllables, prefixes, suffixes and roots, and noticing common spelling patterns.

9. ⏳Verb Tenses

   Choosing irregular past-tense verbs (brought, swam, froze), making verbs agree with their subjects, naming tenses and keeping tense consistent within a sentence.

10. 🔗Complex Sentences

    Choosing conjunctions like although, because and unless, finding dependent and independent clauses, telling simple, compound and complex sentences apart, and combining sentences.

11. ✒️Punctuation Power

    Placing commas after introductory words, using colons before lists, writing possessives and contractions, choosing its/it's and their/there/they're, and punctuating dialogue.

12. 🎨Create With Words, Pictures and Sound

    Planning and polishing texts that combine words, images, sound and video, and choosing fonts, layout and tools to suit an audience and purpose.

13. ✏️Revise and Spell It Right

    Using checklists and feedback to revise for order and focus, and using spelling patterns, strategies and dictionaries (with Canadian spelling) to check words.

14. 💬Talk, Listen and Ask Why

    Listening to summarize, joining a discussion respectfully, asking open-ended questions and using complex sentences with transition words to share ideas.

15. 📺Media Smarts

    Spotting the tricks ads use, telling facts from opinions, and asking smart questions about who made a message and why.

16. 🎯Set a Goal and Track Your Growth

    Setting specific learning goals, using class criteria and descriptive feedback, and collecting evidence to see progress in reading, writing, speaking, listening and representing.