The GUM ---"Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics" curriculum---will build your students' mastery of the conventions of standard English.

Short, two-page lessons with five easy steps (Read & Analyze, Practice, Apply, and Reinforce) provide self-guided instruction and practice in less than 15 minutes per day. Seventy-four lessons plus additional exercises, spelling activities, and proofreading exercises are included to provide full coverage of English and plenty of practice opportunities. This is a spiral curriculum that promotes skill retention and development as students revisit the same grammar, usage, and mechanics topics in greater complexity as they advance through the grades. 

Unit post-tests give students practice with test formats they'll encounter on a variety of assessments, such as nonfiction reading passages with text-dependent questions and selected response questions. Diagnostic unit pretests and unit reviews provide teachers with additional assessment options. 

The units in this grade 8 workbook cover: sentence structure, parts of speech, usage, and grammar. Students will learn about participles and participial phrases, gerunds and gerund phrases, active/passive voice, ordering adjectives, the subjunctive mood, avoiding mood shifts, eliminating unnecessary words, writing about quantity, subject-verb agreement, and more.

397 newsprint-like pages, indexed, softcover. Non-reproducible; consumable workbook. Grade 8.