Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming.

• Use knowledge of Greek, Latin and Anglo-Saxon roots, prefixes and suffixes to understand:
  • the relationship of words with common roots, prefixes or suffixes
  • complex words
  • the meaning of unknown words in science, mathematics and social studies;
• Recognize French, German and Spanish words that are based on the same Greek and Latin roots;
• Identify words that have similar meanings (synonyms) and words that have opposite meanings (antonyms);
• Use words from other languages that have been adopted into the English language;
• Understand idioms (cold turkey, elbow grease);
• Understand how our language grows through new pharmaceutical, household and industrial products and newly-coined words;
• Connect to the real world through auto names (Honda Odyssey), sports teams (Denver Nuggets), acronyms (SUNOCO, BLOG, NIMBY), architectural features, election terms (lame duck, grass roots)
• Follow teachers’ instruction and reinforcement of the following conventions in all their writing (as outlined in each teacher’s manual):
  • sentences (declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatory and their respective end marks) that are complete, whether they are simple, complex or compound;
  • punctuation: commas, apostrophes, quotation marks, semicolons, colons, hyphens, dashes, brackets;
  • capitalization;
  • nouns and pronouns in agreement;
  • subjects and verbs in agreement;
  • compound subjects, compound verbs
  • possessive nouns and pronouns;
  • irregular plural nouns: children, women, bacteria, media, data
  • parts of speech: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions, prepositions, interjections;
  • past, present and future verb tenses of both regular and irregular verbs;
  • clauses: introductory (non-dangling), dependent, independent phrases: prepositional, gerund, infinitive, participial;
  • provides grade-appropriate spelling demons to teachers
  • contributes to the overall literacy of students by providing Literary Links® and Featured Facts®;
  • references what is considered to be general knowledge;
  • encourages research through its Think Links® and Delve Deeper® features, allowing for classroom discussions and independent work to investigate a topic;
• Act on teacher reminders that help them to:
  • Use revision strategies to improve the coherence of ideas, clarity of sentence structure and effectiveness of word choices;
  • Edit to improve sentence fluency, grammar and usage;
  • Evaluate the usefulness and credibility of data and sources;
  • Organize information from various resources and select appropriate sources to support central ideas, concepts and themes;
  • Communicate findings through oral, visual, writing or multimedia.