Grade 5: Ages 9-10
In Grade 5 students work on their knowledge of parts of speech, types of sentences, punctuation, and sentence diagramming. Practice in written expression centers on paragraph writing. Students are introduced to the study of poetry. Catholic values are present throughout the book in exercises and in topics for writing assignments.
In Phonics 5 for Young Catholics, the final year of studying phonics, students work with consonant letter-sound associations, digraphs, and diphthongs. Students demonstrate improvement in the decoding of words by analysis of their prefixes, roots, and suffixes. Continued emphasis is placed on compound words, possessives, and contractions.
The fifth grade reading course continues with Faith and Freedom readers, These Are Our People, and A Book of Gratitude. Students continue to build comprehension and thinking skills using the Reading 5 for Young Catholics: Comprehension and Reading 5 for Young Catholics: Thinking Skills workbooks, and they continue with quarterly book reports. Students are expected to comprehend what they read and think about what the author is trying to convey to the reader.
Quarterly book reports expand to a five-paragraph format. For the first two book reports, topic sentences are provided in the lesson plans.
Spelling 5 for Young Catholics provides a full review of basic phonics and spelling rules with teaching suggestions and a recommended weekly spelling plan. Students learn their spelling words in 36 lessons by completing various exercises and then read their words in paragraphs covering the lives of the saints.
Vocabulary 5 for Young Catholics begins each lesson with a fun and entertaining story. Each story introduces 15 new vocabulary words which become the basis for the week’s lesson. Students are more apt to learn new words when they see them in the context of an entertaining story.