Georgia Milestones Grade 5 ELA cheat sheet

English Language Arts Foundations

• Perfect verb tenses: present perfect (has/have plus past participle) shows action continuing to now; past perfect (had plus participle) shows an earlier past action; future perfect (will have plus participle) shows completion by a future time.

• Verb voice: active voice has the subject doing the action (The dog chased the ball); passive voice has the subject receiving it (The ball was chased by the dog).

• Conjunctions by job: coordinating (and, but, or, so, yet) join equal parts; subordinating (because, although, while, if, since) begin dependent clauses.

• A dependent clause has a subject and verb but cannot stand alone; an independent clause can. A sentence fragment is missing a subject, verb, or complete thought.

• Correlative conjunctions come in pairs and must stay parallel: either/or, neither/nor, not only/but also, both/and.

• Commas set off introductory phrases, separate items in a series, and join two independent clauses with a coordinating conjunction; they do not join two independent clauses alone.

• Context clues: definition, example, synonym, antonym, and inference. Check the surrounding sentence before deciding a word's meaning.

• Reference tools: a dictionary gives pronunciation, part of speech, and meanings; a thesaurus lists synonyms and antonyms; a glossary defines terms used in a specific text.

• Greek and Latin roots and affixes build meaning: bio (life), graph (write), tele (far), port (carry), -ology (study of), pre- (before), un- (not).