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K5 Learning Blog

K5 Adds Worksheets on How to Join Cursive Letters

Cursive writing is tough for younger students. Once your child has learned how to write individual cursive letters, it’s hard to move straight onto writing entire cursive words. So we’ve added a new section – a middle step, so to say - that helps students grasp how to join two individual letters. We’ve created a page of the most common letter joins with individual worksheets for each.


They are as follows:


Joining cursive letters at the bottom, such as ch or kn.
ch letter join

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The Best Books About Insects for Young Readers

By Sheila Welch


What could be a more appropriate subject for summertime reading than insects? Here are four books – very different in content, intent, and format – all dealing with insects.

The Gnats of Knotty Pine

The Gnats of Knotty Pine
A favorite of my own children, THE GNATS OF KNOTTY PINE by the prolific author / illustrator, Bill Peet, is not a book admired by the NRA. Peet doesn’t hide his own negative opinion of the “sport” of hunting. The first few pages depict a meeting in the forest attended by an assortment of wild critters from the largest ( a gigantic moose) to the smallest (one tiny gnat in a swarm of gnats). The animals are hoping to devise a way to stay alive and deal with the hunters. How they accomplish their goal is clever and will amuse readers in third through fifth grade.

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New Kindergarten Worksheets and Sections

We are constantly working on improving our free K5 worksheet center. Over the last few weeks we have been putting our efforts into the kindergarten section.

As we’ve added a bigger variety of worksheets, we’ve also re-organized this whole section. Let us show you.


If you come from our main worksheet page, click on kindergarten worksheets.

Free worksheets

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Four Tools to Help Your Kids Practice Expository Writing

We recently discussed the difficulties young students have with expository writing. Here are some tools to help your kids when tackling this style of writing.

They are PDF files so that you can easily print them.

Framework

First, your child needs to put his/her thoughts straight. Here’s a template to help them plan out their report writing.

expository framework

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The importance of learning expository writing at a young age

Expository writing definition

expository writingWe most commonly know expository writing as report writing. This type of writing has the purpose of explaining and clarifying.


Expository writing is fact-based and presents reason, explanations, instructions or directions. Unlike other forms of writing, this type of writing does not include descriptive details or opinions. For expository writing students need to organize their thoughts, follow a plan, sometimes conduct research and support their findings. Honestly, this writing is the most straightforward type of writing your child will learn, yet it is the hardest to grasp.

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Four Tools to Help your Kids Get Started in Narrative Writing

In our last blog post we discussed why narrative writing is important for our kids to learn.  Here are some great tools to help your kids get started with narrative writing. We’ve created them as PDF files so that you can easily print them.

Framework

First, your child needs to formulate his or her ideas. This outline page will help your kids do that. Having filled it out, they can then start writing their story.

outline for narrative writing

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Why it is important for our Kids to Learn Narrative Writing

narrative-writingWhat is narrative writing?

In short, narrative writing tells a story. It’s a piece of writing of a main character (a narrator or the author himself/herself) in a particular setting, who encounters an event – be it a problem, or one that engages the character in an interesting, significant or entertaining experience.

The event that happens to the character is called the plot. That plot follows a beginning, a middle and an end. The middle of the story is usually the biggest part and we call that the main event. This section is what the story is all about. Authors write narrative stories to entertain or teach readers a lesson. This is called author’s purpose.

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How do you Measure the Area of Parallelograms, Triangles and Trapezoids?

In grade 5, students learn to measure the areas of parallelograms, triangles without right angles and trapezoids. What are these shapes and how do you calculate the area of each? In this post, we’ll go through each shape and show you how to calculate the areas.

What is a parallelogram?

A parallelogram is a flat shape with opposite sides parallel and equal in length. This is what it looks like:

parallelogram
 The opposite sides are parallel.
The opposite sides are equal in length.
The opposite angles are equal. In our diagram, that is, the angle of A and C are the same, and the angle of B and D are the same.

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New Grade 4 Vocabulary Worksheets and Workbook

We’ve improved our grade 4 vocabulary worksheets page as well as published a new vocabulary 4 workbook in our bookstore.


We believe that the more vocabulary words students know, the better they are able to comprehend, speak, listen and write. Therefore, we are focusing our efforts on building out our library of vocabulary worksheets and workbooks.


New worksheets added to our vocabulary 4 page are:

Grade 4 vocabulary worksheet applying meaningsThe meaning of words

A group of worksheets that focus on helping students identify and apply words, to match phrases and to use context clues.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Flashcards for Learning Multiple Meanings Words for Grade 3 to 5 Students

multiple meanings wordsThis article is part of a series. It starts with a summary of the 100 most important multiple meaning words elementary school students should learn. Following will be a grade by grade set of Flashcards for those multiple meaning words.

Learning Multiple Meaning Words for Students in Grades 3 - 5 

Here ‘s our final set of multiple meaning words for grade 3 to 5 students. The words covered in this set are:

 

shed – ship – sole – space – spring – squash – stable – steer – stern – stoop – store – train – trunk – watch - yard


Once you have opened the page and printed the pages, you’ll want to fold each page down the vertical line. Cut out the words and definitions as one folded card. That way you can show the word to your child and check the descriptions on the back.

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