5th Grade
All four cores for a full 5th grade year, close reading and clear writing, mathematics through decimals and volume, matter-and-systems science, and early American history told truthfully at ten-year-old depth. Fifth grade is the launchpad for middle school, and these courses are sequenced to make that jump seamless.
Start 30 days freeFive days from the opening week of 5th grade, taken from the lessons themselves rather than written to sound good.
The week opens with evidence, grade-4 style as a refresher: a six-sentence paragraph about a character, a claim ('this character is nervous'), and your child pointing to the sentence that proves it, out loud, before the year moves on to quoting that sentence exactly instead of just pointing.
Math opens by shading a hundredths grid, 0.36 colored in and read aloud as 'thirty-six hundredths,' then two grids compared side by side, 0.6 against 0.42, so decimal size is something your child can see before it's something they calculate.
Science starts with eight picture cards, ice, juice, steam, a balloon, a jar of air, sand, syrup, a puddle, sorted into solid, liquid and gas while you think out loud about shape and flow, the entry point for a unit that ends with matter made of particles too small to see.
Social studies opens by pulling out the five-region U.S. map your child already knows from 4th grade, naming each region and tracing its rough border, before the unit adds the nations who were on that land long before contact.
All four subjects keep their own pace across the week. A 5th grader who's already fluent with decimals can move through that unit fast while still taking the full week the evidence-and-quoting unit in ELA needs, and nobody has to wait on anybody else.
This is a full year of 5th grade reading and writing. The whole year rests on one habit: when your child claims something about a story or an article, they have to back it up with the text's exact words, not a vague memory of what it said. From there they learn to compare two characters, notice how the narrator's viewpoint limits what a story tells you, see how chapters or stanzas build on each other, and pull facts from two different articles on one topic. Then the second half of the year turns around and uses everything they just read as material for their own writing — a story, an opinion essay, and an informative piece. Nothing gets read once and dropped; the same stories and articles come back again and again as the source material for later units.
This is a full year of fifth-grade math built around three ideas: how our number system extends into decimals, how fractions behave when you combine or split them, and how measurement and space help you model real things like boxes and graphs. Every new skill gets a picture first — blocks, an area drawing, a number line, a fraction bar — before your child ever sees the shortcut version. By June, they should be able to add, subtract, multiply, and divide decimals and fractions without hesitating, and plot and read points on a graph. That's the runway sixth grade assumes they already have.
This is a year of science built around one big idea: everything is made of tiny particles you can't see, and those particles don't just vanish — they move around, combine, and rearrange, but the total amount stays put. Your child uses that one idea to explain four very different things over the year: why sugar water still weighs what it should, why rust is different from melting ice, where a tree's mass actually comes from, and why some water is drinkable and some isn't. The last quarter of the year zooms out to Earth as a whole system, then out further to the sun and stars, reusing the same vocabulary the whole way. Almost everything is testable with stuff already in your kitchen — a scale, a balloon, sugar, a flashlight.
This is a year-long American history course that starts before Columbus and ends with the Constitution. Your child will learn that North America was full of established nations before Europeans showed up, then trace why Europeans crossed the ocean, how colonies grew up differently region by region (including the ugly reality of slavery and indentured servitude), why the colonies broke from Britain, how the war was actually won, and how the country built — then rebuilt — its own government. By June they should be able to read a real historical document and make an argument from it, not just recite dates.
Every course above is published in full, every unit, every module, every objective, and you can try a real lesson without an account.
Truthfully, at ten-year-old depth. Colonization, slavery and displacement are presented through evidence and primary voices rather than skipped or softened into myth, and without asking a ten-year-old to carry an adult’s framing. Parents can read every unit before their child does.
That is the design goal of the whole course: decimals, fraction operations and the coordinate plane are exactly the foundations 6th grade ratios and rational numbers are built on, and mastery pacing means no gap gets papered over on the way out.