Grade 5 English Home Language (CAPS): a term-by-term guide to reading, writing and language

Course guides › Grade 5 › English Home Language

In Grade 5 English Home Language, learners read and write a wide range of texts: information texts, stories, newspaper articles, poems, weather reports, plays, advertisements and folk tales. Each two-week cycle of the school year pairs one text type with the language rules that go with it.

This guide sets out what the CAPS curriculum and the DBE’s 2023/24 Annual Teaching Plan cover in each term, the key ideas with short examples, and how you can help at home. Our Grade 5 English HL course is being built in that order, with Matthew as the guide.

What’s covered, term by term

Term 1

• Information text: reading one and writing 3–4 paragraphs
• Verbs and the present and future tense
• Novel extract and writing a book review
• Pronouns, adjectives, adverbs and conjunctions
• Story: reading and writing a narrative or descriptive story
• Nouns, prefixes, suffixes and the past tense
• Newspaper article: headline, by-line, lead paragraph and the 5 Ws + H
• Prepositions, articles and antonyms
• Instructions: command form and sequence
• Simple and complex sentences

Term 2

• Poetry: alliteration, assonance, simile and metaphor
• Collective and abstract nouns; present continuous tense
• Weather report with a map and symbols
• Gerunds and compound sentences
• Play: reading a play and writing a dialogue
• Sentence types; direct and indirect speech
• Report with tables, graphs or maps
• Continuous tenses; active and passive voice

Term 3

• Folklore: a myth or legend
• Singular and plural, objects and questions
• Research project: finding and organising information (mind maps, Venn diagrams)
• Research project: writing it up and presenting it
• Advertisement: persuasive language and layout
• Degrees of comparison; subject–verb agreement
• Poem: reading for enjoyment and writing one
• Figurative language: personification, idioms and proverbs

Term 4

• Folklore story with animal characters
• Subject, object and concord
• Information text with pictures: writing a report
• Phrases and homonyms
• Information text with graphs and tables
• Articles, clauses, negatives and questions

Key ideas, with worked examples

Reading a newspaper article

A news report answers who, what, when, where, why and how. The lead paragraph gives the most important facts first, and the details follow.

Worked example. Headline: “Learners clean up local river”. Lead: “On Saturday, 40 Grade 5 learners from Riverside Primary collected 60 bags of litter from the Jukskei River to protect the fish living there.” That one sentence answers who, what, when, where and why.

Tenses

The tense of the verb tells you when something happens. Grade 5 adds the continuous tenses, which show an action that is still going on.

Worked example. Simple present: She reads. Present continuous: She is reading. Simple past: She read. Past continuous: She was reading when the bell rang.

Direct and indirect speech

Direct speech gives the speaker’s exact words inside quotation marks. Indirect (reported) speech reports them without quotation marks, and the tense usually moves back.

Worked example. Direct: Thabo said, “I am hungry.” Indirect: Thabo said that he was hungry.

Simile and metaphor

A simile compares two things using like or as; a metaphor says one thing is another.

Worked example. Simile: The wind howled like a wolf. Metaphor: The classroom was a zoo.

Common mistakes (and how to fix them)

• Run-on sentences. Joining ideas with commas instead of full stops or conjunctions. Read the writing aloud: where you pause for breath, you usually need a full stop.
• Mixing tenses in one story. Starting in the past and slipping into the present. Decide on a tense before writing and check every verb.
• Forgetting the format. A newspaper article needs a headline, a book review needs the title and author, and instructions need numbered steps.
• Quotation marks in indirect speech. Reported speech never uses them.
• Copying from the text in comprehension answers when the question says “in your own words”.

Tips for parents

• Little and often. Fifteen minutes on most school days works better than a long session once a week.
• Read together, then talk. Ask what happened, why a character acted that way, and what might happen next. That is exactly what comprehension questions ask.
• Use real texts: the weather page, a recipe, a pamphlet or a news headline are all CAPS text types.
• Plan before writing. A quick mind map of ideas, then a first draft, then a check for spelling and punctuation, matches the school’s writing process.
• Keep a word book for new words, synonyms and antonyms.

Frequently asked questions

Does the course mark my child’s essays?

No automatic system marks free writing well, so writing tasks will have a planning frame in the printable coursebook and a model answer with a simple rubric in the parent memo. Quizzes check reading, language and writing choices.

Which books will it use?

Set books differ from school to school, so the course will use its own short original texts written for Grade 5.

How much will the Grade 5 English Home Language course cost?

R100 per subject per year once it opens. Like our live courses, it will be one course for the whole year with Terms 1 to 4 inside it, so there’s nothing extra to pay per term.

When will the course be ready?

We’re building it now. The Grade 5 English Home Language card on our home page shows “Coming soon” until the course is ready, and then it changes to “Open course”.

Will it work on a phone, and will it use a lot of data?

Yes, it will work on a phone. Like our live Maths courses, it will open in a phone’s web browser or in the free Coursebox app for Android and iPhone. Lessons are pictures and short text with quizzes and no videos, so it uses little data.

Is there an Afrikaans version?

This is the English Home Language course, so it is in English. Afrikaans is a separate subject with its own course (Afrikaans First Additional Language).

Get ready for Grade 5 English Home Language

The Grade 5 English Home Language (CAPS) course is coming soon at R100 per subject per year. Bookmark this guide and use the term lists above to follow what your child is doing at school. While you wait, our Grade 5 Mathematics course is available through Coursebox.

Back to the Grade 5 course cards · All Grade 5 guides

Sources and review

This guide is based on the DBE’s CAPS English Home Language Grades 4–6 document and the 2023/24 Grade 5 English HL Annual Teaching Plan, and on our course topic plan. Last reviewed: 31 October 2026. AI Buddies is an independent project and is not endorsed by the Department of Basic Education.