Verbs do a lot of the heavy lifting in good writing. Understanding the different kinds of verbs and how they are used enables students to write more compellingly. Students will explore how tenses work and how they must agree with and sometimes work together with other words in the sentence. Students will also learn about adverbs, the "sister" part of speech that enhance, or modify, verbs.

Words are like legos - they can have interchangeable parts. In this unit students will study the construction of words including roots, prefixes and suffixes. Students will also explore how to modify words to make them possessive, a different part of speech and adjust to signify singular and plural. Understanding the basic building blocks of words, will increase students’ vocabulary, improve their spelling and add strategies for decoding unfamiliar words.