A sentence stands alone to express a complete thought. Surprisingly, most 5th graders still need to revisit the concepts of complete sentences and fragments and how to punctuate the four different kinds of sentences. Combining shorter sentences into longer, more complex sentences is another skill that requires practice. Students get all of that needed review in this unit, in addition to learning how to identify and fix run-on sentences.

Letter writing is a very engaging and authentic way to learn formatting, punctuation and grammar. The activities in this unit should be learned in tandem with actual letter writing to aunts, uncles or other special far-away people. That way, students can learn and practice the letter writing skills and then apply them in their own letters. It would be especially rich to include their thoughts about books they are reading.

When students learn the patterns and structures of words they become word wizards! They are able to more fluently convert a word from one part of speech to another, adjust the meaning, or translate a word from singular to plural (or vice versa). In this set of activities students will build on their knowledge of word structure and practice adding prefixes and suffixes, changing tenses and using contractions.

Words work together in a sentence, each one performing a different task. By fifth grade, students have become more adept readers and writers and they are familiar with the basic parts of speech. The activities in this unit revisit some of the basics and also add depth to their existing understanding. Students will engage in such topics as superlative adjectives, correlative conjunctions and prepositional phrases, to name a few.