This course provides structured lessons on reading, writing, grammar, and research. Students study parts of speech including verbs, adverbs, adjectives, pronouns, and prepositional phrases. The course spends time focusing on plot, setting, themes, and points of view. In addition, students will compare different types of drama and various forms of poetry. They will learn how to read and gather information from scientific articles and historical accounts. Students will go through the research process of planning, gathering information, analyzing information, and then presenting information in a multimedia format.

This research-based course focuses on computational fluency, conceptual understanding, and problem solving. This interactive course features new graphics, learning tools, and games; adaptive activities that help struggling students master concepts and skills before moving on. This course builds on student understanding of numbers and operations by making connections between place value, decimals, and fractions; introducing multiplication and division of decimal numbers; and extending understanding of fraction operations. The course enhances fluency of operations with whole numbers, fractions, and decimals through application in the solving of measurement, geometry, and data-analysis problems using mathematical problem-solving techniques. Students continue to develop algebraic thinking as they work with variables and formulas to solve multistep word problems, they further study patterns and rules, and they are introduced to representing problems graphically using the coordinate plane.