This is the 1 st Grade language course by Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt. It consists of a large spiral-bound teacher's manual, a smaller paperback Language Skills and Writing Assessment Teacher's Edition, and a nice-sized student workbook. All the pages are beautifully done with color illustrations. This is classroom quality and is for use in public schools, private schools, or homeschools. This is the type of resource I used when I was a substitute teacher in the public schools. It is very user-friendly. Each lesson in the teacher's manual illustrates the corresponding pages in the student workbook and contains instructions for the lesson under the following categories: oral warm-up, teach/model, and wrap up/assess. Other sections for each lesson are: Vocabulary Power, ESL, Practice, Challenge, and Reteach. Reteach contains an intervention to reinforce the lesson if needed. There are more reteaching resources behind the Resources tab in the back of the teacher's edition, as well as other helpful information.

The student workbook has 288 pages, and all are perforated to tear out of the book. Some fold into booklets, some have things to cut out, and most have blanks to fill in. There are nice poems and stories and the beginning of grammar basics. There are plenty of opportunities for practicing writing skills.

This course is so well done and so nicely laid. All a parent has to do to prepare is read the instructions in the teacher's manual and present the lesson. The experts at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have planned the whole year out in the way most conducive to first-grade learning. I am very excited about having this resource to use next year. It will give my granddaughter a very solid start on the road to language/grammar proficiency. I recommend this to all homeschoolers because it takes the guesswork out of teaching this very crucial subject. At this early age is when you want to lay the foundation for your child's entire education, and you want some very solid building materials to accomplish that goal.